


You Shot Me Down (Bang Bang)

by dancinbutterfly



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: AU as of season 1, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Fingering, Anal Fisting, Anal Sex, Bottom Derek, Bottom Derek Hale, Boys Kissing, Dating, Derek and Stiles Being Idiots, Developing Relationship, Emotions, Falling In Love, Families of Choice, French Kissing, Gangbang, Group sex but Stiles and Derek are always there and its always about them, I'm not kidding, It's positively Victorian if Victorians had diners, Kink Negotiation, M/M, No really like a lot of pie, Pie, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Public Blow Jobs, Relationship Negotiation, Sex Club, Siblings, Sleeping Together, They fall in love over pie and long walks, Top Derek Hale, Top Stiles Stilinski, Victoria is a vicious speciesist, Werewolves aren't known but Stiles knows about them because of Scott, sex without orgasms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 19:50:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2744945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinbutterfly/pseuds/dancinbutterfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles has never visited a bathhouse before so he doesnt expect to meet the most beautiful and damaged man(well, werewolf) he's ever seen in the middle of a gangbang. What follows is a romance forged through strange sex acts, held hands, pie, shared workloads, long conversations and pie. So much pie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Shot Me Down (Bang Bang)

**Author's Note:**

> I've been sitting on this story for almost a year waiting for TeenWolfBigBang. It is in a lot of ways my baby. All the warnings should be in the tags. If you have any questions about the warnings hit me on my ask at dancinbutterfly.tumblr.com and I'll fill you in.
> 
> Also check out the AMAZING PITCH PERFECT [fanmix](http://erraticonstilts.livejournal.com/180064.html) by erraticonstilts.

Gangbangs are not Stiles’s thing. Granted, he hasn’t had any chances to be involved in gangbangs in his real life thus far to form that sort of judgment. It’s just, you know, based on source material made available via the internet, he’s figured out that they are not his cup of tea. Not that there’s anything wrong with a good gangbang! He is not judging. It’s just that they’ve never been his favorite, is all.

Not that Stiles has one specific favorite sex act. He’s open to various activities. But, like, gangbangs? What even? How did he end up standing in front of one? Oh, right, he’s in a bathhouse with the hilarious name of Hard Rick’s. Well, fuck, Stiles thought it was funny. He likes puns and refuses to apologize for that.

Anyway. Not the point. The point is that Stiles sort of forgot, um, everything up to and including his own name and how to breathe when he sees the gangbang. A real life gangbang, right in front of him. Though, gangbang is starting not to feel like a real word anymore, but that doesn’t change the fact that one is happening. Right here. At least ten dudes of varying races and ages clustered in a circle around one guy who is spit-roasted and writhing in the center, just like porn always promised. That is a thing that Stiles is looking at right now.

Stiles had not been expecting this. He’d stopped in looking for a basic, no strings hook-up. All he wanted was maybe to make-out with someone cute while getting jerked off or to trade blowjobs. He’s busy okay? He's in law school, full time, and he works forty hours a week in the university library to help subsidize his education, neither of which help change the fact that he’s single.

Stiles only even bothered to give Hard Rick’s a shot because he needed to do something other than stab Scott in his lopsided werewolfy face; which he would do too, if Scott sniffed the air one more time and declared, “Dude, you’ve got to get laid. You’re killing me with your reek.”

Getting to Castro from their townhouse, less than a block from the San Francisco State campus, isn’t worth the time, effort, and money when there’s a perfectly seedy bathhouse a bus ride away. Stopping in at Hard Rick’s had seemed like a better idea than whittling a stake out of wolfsbane, murdering his best friend, and remaining sexually unfulfilled.

Unlike what they show on movies and Queer as Folk, there’s nothing glitzy or shiny in here. Most of the guys are older than his dad, out of shape, kind of gross or any fun combination of those charming traits. Stiles even leaves his Converse on —which has to look weird with just the mandatory towel wrapped around his waist — because holy shit, the floor outside the locker and the lobby was _sticky_. 

Stiles looks around at the couples rutting with white rectangles of terrycloth between their skin and the cushioned platform beneath them. Clearly he isn’t the only one who has a problem with that. Hence the towels. The fact that other people on the prowl for anonymous sex have some hygiene standards too comforts Stiles deeply.

The whole thing is strange and foreign, like being dropped in another country without knowing a word of the language including the important ones like ‘Do you speak English?’ or ‘Where’s the restroom?’. Although, he will admit that for every six or seven guys he wouldn’t go near, there is at least one guy Stiles does a double take on. He makes his way through all the dark, winding hallways of the club, just looking, before he stumbles into an extra dark alcove filled with the sounds of sex that translate into, well, a gangbang.

Okay, Stiles is good at making his presence known in a crowd, but there are limits. What he’s looking for isn’t in this room - probably isn’t in Hard Rick’s at all - so he almost leaves. Before he comes out of shock enough to move, the pistoning hips fucking the bottom’s mouth move back and Stiles gets a look at the man in the center of the scene.

His jaw is slack, open and waiting for the same cock to return or for a new one to replace it. His head tips back for ease of access down his long, graceful throat when a new cock replaces the one that just pulled out. His whole body is limp, jostling with every thrust from the man fucking him while one of his hands is held curled around another cock, a makeshift hand job he’s too fucked out to give.

He’s possibly the most beautiful person Stiles has ever seen in his whole life.

Stiles sways on his feet. He feels hypnotized by the man’s lips, his nose, his brow, his cheekbones, and what is too far away to see in those dark eyes. Stiles knows he’s staring, knows he’s not the only one in the room watching the show; even as the man getting blown moments ago comes shuddering over that lush mouth and stubbled face. Stripes of white drip down through the beginnings of a black beard towards the guy’s ear for a moment before someone else’s fingers drag through the mess and smears it down the man’s neck and into his skin.

The man is movie-star beautiful, with dark hair and features that look like Michelangelo carved him out of marble. Stiles doesn’t realize he’s moved closer until his knees hit the couch and he finds himself kneeling with the rest of the crowd around the man. A new top is fucking him harder than the one who was there when Stiles came in. Someone else is coming with a shudder against his hip, adding to the mess covering his chest.

Stiles feels guilty that he’s so hard at the sight of this gorgeous man used like this, but he can’t help it. Now that he’s close, he can hear a low rhythmic moan, guttural and almost growling. It’s not coming from any of the men stroking themselves to the sight of the chiseled body below them or burying themselves in what Stiles is sure is tight, wet heat.

No, the sound falls in time to the tempo set by the man fucking him, muffled by the cock gliding in and out of those bruised lips. It’s coming from the beautiful man because he wants this, because he loves this. From here Stiles can see that he’s just as hard as Stiles, maybe even more. For all the skin on skin contact, no one is touching him there and who knows how long this has been going on. It doesn’t feel fair to Stiles but then his feelings about this keep being wrong, so he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything but press his palm to his erection through his towel and watch.

Sloppy group jobs like this still aren’t his thing, but the man is. The man is Stiles’ wet dream come to life, like that statue in fucking Pygmalion so he can’t look away. He can’t. Not even when he comes, soundless and shaking, grinding against his hand, hot into the fabric and onto his thighs as the man is fucked and fucked and fucked, making that low moaning growl the whole time.

He can’t look away so he sees when the top comes, cursing and calling the man a whore and a slut, then pulls out. The guy isn’t wearing a condom and as soon as he’s not inside, come starts to leak from the man’s hole. 

“Wait,” Stiles says, but it comes out a choked whisper because someone else has already taken the condom-free guy’s place and he’s not wearing protection either. Stiles coughs and tries again. “Wait,” and that sounds like him, like his voice at a volume that can be heard over the moaning and and grunting and techno music turned up too loud. “You guys aren’t using condoms. Wait.”

Beside him, a Caucasian man in his mid-fifties elbows Stiles in the side. Stiles can’t help but notice he’s got on a wedding ring.

“Shut the fuck up, kid. Pretty Boy knew what he was asking for when he started,” Married Guy hisses. “He said he’d take bare, so guys are going in bare.” He shrugs, “And any guy willing to dip his wick in that mess is getting what he deserves.”

“You can’t just let that happen,” Stiles forces out through clenched teeth. He’s a fucking hypocrite because he just came watching this, but he didn’t realize. He hadn’t known. Now he does and he can’t just leave it. He’s not that guy. 

“I mean, no glove no love; it’s sex ed 101. They’ve got condoms in bowls for free in every doorway in this building. It’s not safe.”

“Neither’s driving a car during rush hour, but we do that all the fucking time,” Married Guy says with a shrug. “Why do you think I’m in the stands instead of down on the field?”

“Because you don’t want to bring an STI back to your wife, then have to explain to her that not only were you out sport-fucking. You never told her about the fact that you’re into dudes?” Stiles snaps. Married Guy flinches.

“Fuck you, kid. You think I didn't just see you come?”

“I didn’t know and I’m not hiding anything from anyone.”

“Fucking killjoy,” Married Guy mutters and moves down the man’s body so there’s a good foot of space between them. A new man, tall, black, handsome and only ten years older than Stiles moves into the space they made. A new spectator at the show.

Stiles suddenly feels sick. He doesn’t leave. He feels like he has to stay, like if something happens, if the man changes his mind and wants to stop - Stiles needs to be there. In the end, though, it’s not necessary. The harsh house lights flick on, then off — twice — signaling closing time, and everyone drifts away. Stiles leaves as fast as he can. He runs into the locker room and showers with his sneakers on in his hurry. He pats himself dry with a mercifully clean towel before dressing and leaning against the lockers opposite the one entrance to wait.

Men flow in and out like a tide, rolling into the locker rooms in towels and out in street clothes. Stiles waits for half an hour until the tide stops. It’s another five minutes of waiting alone until the man strolls in, filthy with come dried in his hair, on his chest, neck, face and legs that the towels around his waist and shoulders don’t hide. He doesn’t even look at Stiles as he passes and steps into the shower.

Stiles’s feet squish in his shoes as he follows. He puts both hands on the doorframe to the shower room with enough space for an orgy of its own and watches the man wash and rinse his face before speaking. “So, hey, hi. Um, mind if I ask what that was?”

The man opens one eye. It’s a ridiculous green and the brow quirks with it. “Excuse me?”

Stiles takes a deep breath and just goes for it even though it’s totally inappropriate and so not his business, but really he can’t control himself. He can feel his mouth moving without permission or even an attempt at tact. “The GRID/pre-AIDS swingin’ seventies style fuckfest. Do you have a death wish or something? Because it was like watching someone at an all you can eat VD buffet.”

“You seemed to enjoy it,” the man says, tipping his head back under the stream. "You came didn’t you?”

“I…did,” Stiles admits because hey, no point lying now. “But that is so not the point here.”

“You had a point?”

“You weren’t safe.”

“No,” the man agrees, leaning over to the Costco economy-sized pump of soap on the tiled floor. He gets a few liberal squeezes out before he takes on his hair.

“You can’t just say ‘no’ like that - like it’s no big deal.”

“Says who?”

“Me. I say so.”

“And you are?”

“Oh, uh, I’m Stiles. Stiles Stilinski. What’s your name? I kind of just realized we skipped the whole introductions part.”

He holds out a hand, but it just gets another eyebrow quirk. Stiles drops his hand after a five count of pure, unadulterated awkward silence.

“Derek,” he says, and when Stiles waves, he sighs and finishes, “Hale." 

Stiles thinks that he was just waiting for Stiles to surrender and show desperation before he spoke, the dick. Derek sighs again and turns under the shower spray. “So, are you the fuck police, Stiles? Do you roam back rooms and alleyways making sure that deviants and cocksluts like me always play it safe?”

“Do I what? No. Dude,” Stiles gapes. “You have some issues.”

“Me? I was going to just have a shower but someone ambushed me,” Derek points out. And okay, that’s fair. Maybe he’s being a little bit judgemental.

In all fairness, he is having a hard time thinking with the way Derek is soaping his stomach now. The foam that forms as he scrubs his skin and scrapes away dried semen with his fingernails isn’t distracting at all. Nope.

Neither is the fact that Derek is still hard, probably has been all night. His cock is awesome, really, a good eight inches with a slight curve and Stiles is totally bewildered. How has no one gotten this guy, Derek, off yet? Because that is a dick that is just asking to be sucked.

Right. The view isn’t what he’s interrupting this shower to talk about, as glorious as it is. “This is not an ambush. This is an intervention,” Stiles corrects. “I didn’t have time to make a sign or get balloons but the intention is there, I promise. There will be intervention balloons next time.”

“Interventions usually involve family and friends.”

“Well, you can consider me a friend.”

“You’re a guy who jerked off watching a bunch of guys run a train on my ass. That’s not a cornerstone of friendship.”

“It could be! This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

That earns Stiles another fathomless stare. “You just quoted Casablanca at me.”

“Maaaaaaybe?” It’s not really a question but it comes out sounding like one anyway. “I’m just saying, what you did tonight…,” he rubs the back of his neck because Derek’s eyes (gorgeous, more blue than green at the moment. And who the fuck even has eyes like that, seriously) are still locked on him. Water sluices down his body taking soap bubbles and leftover sex-sweat, dried come and lube with it down the drain.

“What I did tonight was my business.”

“Yeah, I agree. I support your right to be reamed completely,” Stiles declares and Derek snorts. “But holy syphilis, Batman. Look, there’s this clinic by my school that opens at seven. It’s-,” Stiles glances at his watch, “Five-thirty now. I’ll buy you breakfast at this 24/7 greasy spoon we have to pass to get there, and then drop you off.”

“At a clinic.”

“Yes,” Stiles says slowly. “At a clinic. Where you can get tested, you know, for all the icky sex diseases you can catch from getting fucked without a condom. Seriously, have you seen what a bad outbreak of HPV can look like? You know how barnacles grow on the pylons that hold up a pier? Kind of like that, only the pylon is metaphorical wood, rather than literal wood in this scenario. Leprosy of the junk, almost. I saw it in sex ed and then even worse on Grey’s Anatomy,” Stiles shudders. Health class had been scarring. “No one wants that when they’ve got a perfectly nice penis to start with.”

Of course now he’s staring at Derek’s crotch again. Obviously. Hugely obviously. So obviously that Derek actually clears his throat and says, “My eyes are up here,” and Stiles wants to literally die. But not until he gets Derek to a free goddamn clinic.

“Right. I know. So, come on!” He jerks his thumbs over his shoulder. He’s going for friendly and cheerful, like wasn’t just staring hungrily at Derek’s cock. “Finish up, get dressed, let’s go get breakfast.”

“You sure you want to go out for that? I mean, you could always just come over here, finish me off.” The right corner of his mouth twitches. “Lots of protein.”

Stiles would normally melt under an invitation like that, drop to his knees right there under the water and get his clothes soaked in his rush to suck that stunning cock. Only now that he’s been talking to him, Stiles can tell Derek’s voice is flat. He doesn’t want Stiles to get him off any more than he wanted those men to use condoms.

The whole thing has a sort of twisted sadness to it that makes Stiles want to dig deeper, learn more, find a way to help. None of the things Derek did or suggested should be dangerous or depressing. They should be sexy or at least sexually satisfying. Only they’re somehow not.

Stiles knows better than to say that right now, though. He has matured a little since high school. Not a lot, but some. So, he pulls it his way with a grin and a wry remark. It’s worked before. He needs it to work now.

“Yeah no. See, I would blow you? I really, really would because, yeah, obviously you’ve looked in a mirror or, like, down before ever in your life. However, I’m going to have to go with no. You could be crawling with crabs for all I know.”

That startles a laugh out of Derek. It’s a sharp sound that echoes in the small shower and hits Stiles like a punch in the face. “Crabs. Right. They’re an endangered species.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” Stiles agrees, eyebrows shooting up, impressed that he knows that. Usually Stiles is the only one in a given room with weird sex knowledge. “They’re, like, on the verge of total extinction since everyone started shaving their pubes. We’re starving them to death with our hairless crotches. What’s that even about anyway? Not that you don’t look really nice and everything,” Stiles stutters, reassessing Derek’s heavily muscled and extremely smooth body.

Seriously, from neck to mid-thigh he’s completely waxed except for a beckoning happy trail. He could’ve walked off the cover of Men’s Health or, like, Playgirl. Stiles would’ve bought issues of both.

“You look great. It’s just that with my luck, I’ll be the one person on earth to get pubic lice living in my actual head hair just from being in this building. So I have to pass; at least until after you get tested, which is why you should come with me now. Because if we get there early maybe I can stay and they can do some of the quick turn around stuff and I can blow you after?”

Derek peers at him through the water. He turns off the spray then steps out and shakes himself like a wet dog. It gets all over Stiles, gee thanks, before he grabs a clean towel hanging off a hook. “You are not normal.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever been accused of being normal. Look, just, let me buy you breakfast and then walk you to the doctor, okay? If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me. For my peace of mind.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Yes, you do. I’m Stiles. I introduced myself like a minute ago.”

“What are the chances that you’re going to disappear if I tell you to fuck off?” He asks but amusement underlies his words. Good. Stiles can work with amused. 

“Slim to none. My dad’s a cop and I’ve got an ex-boyfriend with hacker skills that put him on the FBI watchlist, then got him hired by them, who owes me a favor.”

That last one is totally true too. Danny owes him hugely for managing to take care of that thing, with that guy, that time senior year of which They Do Not Discuss, that may or may not have involved destroying items in an evidence locker at the Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department. Point is that Danny owes him a big favor that Stiles will never call in because Danny was the first boy he ever kissed and he wouldn’t do that to him. And also, Stiles feels like Don Corleone just knowing he can call it in at all. Yes, he’s seen the Godfather too many times. So what?

Derek sighs. Stiles knows that sigh. That is a sigh of near defeat. “Come on. There’s a diner three blocks from the clinic with awesome pie.”

Derek’s eyes narrow. “What kind of pie?”

“What kind do you want? The usual: pecan, chocolate silk, and an apple pie that’ll make you want to find the tree that produced the apples and smother it with kisses.”

“And you’re buying?” Derek asks, eyes narrowing further.

“Yes.”

"And all I have to do is get tested."

Stiles nods.

There’s another sigh but this one is at a different pitch than the others. Oh yeah. Stiles knows that sigh. That sigh means he’s won clearer than a quarter slots machine cashing out.

“Fine. You’re buying me pie.”

“Absolutely. Pies all around. Also, I really want bacon. Thoughts on bacon? I’m strongly in favor, you?”

Derek doesn’t respond as he gets dressed. Stiles doesn’t mind too much because Derek is beside him. He looks gorgeous as they make their way to the nearest train station in the early morning light. He's an Abercrombie and Fitch rebel without a cause in stylishly raggedy jeans, and green shirt with a leather jacket, and boots, both of which probably cost more than Stiles makes in a month at the library.

~*~*~*~

The waitress is a pretty, round faced Caribbean woman with smooth umber skin somewhere between ten and fifteen years older than they are. She takes their orders and returns with their food so fast Stiles’s head swims. Snow white rivulets of melting ice cream drip down the sides of the huge slice of apple pie Derek is working on. Stiles does not think about come dribbling down Derek’s chest or neck or out of the corner of his mouth. He totally doesn’t. He is a master of self control. Yep. Zen as fuck.

Though not as zen as Derek, who is on his fourth slice. Stiles got eggs, bacon, and banana-chocolate chip pancakes and a strawberry shake because screw the food pyramid. He’s earned this, but the volume of pastry and ice cream Derek is inhaling is just excessive. Then again, to get a body like Derek’s, he probably needs to carbo-load like Michael Phelps. That or being used as a human fuck-toy really works up an appetite.

Stiles plants an elbow on the table, his fork dangling from between his fingers with a pancake still impaled on the tongs. “Do you want me to just buy you the whole pie?” he asks. “I think that might be more, I don’t know, expedient.”

“Big word,” Derek says around a mouthful. “You studying for the SATs?”

“I’m already in law school. So it’d be the LSATs if I weren’t, you know, already in school. And I do not look that young.”

Derek swallows, then chuckles. It’s a little mean. “Yeah, you do. You’re a twink stuck in a twink’s body.”

“I can’t tell if that was rude or a compliment.” That earns him a shrug. “I’m going to take it as a compliment.”

“You do that.”

“I will. Seriously, though. I’m just buying the rest of the pie because you and it are going to run off to Iowa and get married anyway. It will just save time.”

Derek shakes his fork at him. “They don’t put the whole pie back in the oven like they do with individual slices.” He takes another obscene bite, with the ice cream and the pie and those lips of sexiness. Stiles’s life is so unfair. “Kind of defeats the point of going out for pie ala mode if they don’t do it that way.”

Flabbergasted, Stiles gapes at him, opening and closing his mouth like a badly drawn cartoon character. He has to scramble through his brain for actual words before he can speak. He by no means has them back, since what comes out is “That’s a priority to you. Hot pie is important but safe sex isn’t. Are you serious right now?”

Derek shrugs which just, ugh, Stiles wants to smack him. If the table weren’t so wide and Derek weren’t so far away, he’d do it too. He’s never hit a stranger before. Not even after Scott was first turned, and things were crazy in Beacon Hills for a few months while Allison’s dad hunted down the alpha who turned him. But man, he would now if he could just reach Derek’s face.

“That’s because pie’s important.”

“But your health isn’t.” Stiles pinches the bridge of his nose with his free hand.

“Listen, Stilinski-”

“Stiles.”

“Stiles. I came here because you were buying and I have a sweet tooth. I’m not going to a clinic, so just let it go, all right?”

“Are you out of your fucking mind? Of course you’re going!”

Derek levels him with a cool level gaze. “I’m not. I’m fine. I’ll be fine. There’s nothing to worry about so just- Leave it alone.”

Stiles has never been able to leave things alone. Even when he stops in public, he can’t help but let his mind follow the course all the way to the end. This, though, he has to follow through on. It’s gone from concern to compulsion. “No. Look. I know I’ve only known you a couple of hours, but I’m not going to leave you to something that could kill you, okay? So, shut your goddamn mouth, eat your goddamn pie and then you’re coming with me to the goddamn clinic.”

“I’m. Fine,” He growls. Actually growls. “Don’t push me on this, kid.”

“What? Do you think you’re immune or something? Like you can’t catch AIDS because you’re a super special snowflake of anti-viral power?” Stiles demands, whipping his fork through the air at Derek with an air of accusation. “You know you can get re-infected even if you’ve already got HIV right? There’s more than one strain so if you’re saying you’re fine just because you already have something, you’re wrong. You could’ve caught another version and then you’d have two different viral types of HIV at once.”

“I’m HIV negative.”

“That you know of. There were at least ten different guys that I saw-“

“It was more than that.”

“-and you don’t think one of them had something transmittable?”

“Probably.”

“That doesn’t matter?” Stiles demands desperately. His heart has been trying to claw its way out of his chest for this whole conversation and now he feels like he can barely breathe. The sadness is back in Derek’s expression, underneath every muscle movement like a skeleton beneath skin.

Derek shrugs again. “I don’t get sick.”

“But you could. You could hurt yourself doing what you’re doing.”

Derek shrugs. Stiles wants to cry.

“You could die if you keep going like this.”

“No. I can’t.

“Why? Are you a werewolf?”

Derek’s fork clatters onto the plate and suddenly they’re just staring at each other. Stiles sucks in a breath and his eyes go huge. There is no way that guess was right except for how he is obviously dead-on if Derek’s expression is any indication. 

“Oh my god, you are, aren’t you? You’re a werewolf. Okay,” He exhales and sinks back into his chair. “Okay, I’m feeling a little better about your crazy-stupid sexcapade now.”

“Werewolves are a myth,” Derek says, but the words are hoarse, like he’s choking on his pie.

“No, they’re not,” Stiles breathes, so sure of the knowledge that he could balance his whole world on it. It’s an undeniable truth, just like Stiles’s love for his dad and Scott and Allison; the fact that the earth orbits the sun; and the tragic reality that people always start decorating for Christmas too early. Derek _is_ a werewolf. “My best friend was bitten when we were in 10th grade, so I know super-healing and immunity’s part of the package, which makes your thing make more sense.” 

He finally eats the neglected piece of pancake that’s been patiently waiting for him on the end of his fork. It’s chocolatey banana goodness and relief makes it taste even better. “You probably shouldn’t do it because, I mean, it’s not really safe for the other guys but you really _are_ okay.”

Derek's sea-water eyes are huge in his sculpted face. It's so cute. Stiles does not pinch his cheeks. Does not. Points have been earned for restraint there, kay, thanks. “This conversation is not happening.”

“The Jedi mind trick only works on those with weak minds, my furry friend, so you’ll find nothing to work with here.”

Derek pushes the pie away from him like it’s toxic. That seems unfair to the pie, Stiles thinks. “Not happening.”

“Can you turn into an actual wolf? Because Scott can’t, he just gets claws, teeth, glowy eyes and fur, but the alpha could turn into this giant wolf-monster thing and Allison, Scott’s wife, says some can but I’ve never seen it.”

“I’m in the fucking Twilight Zone.”

“I won’t tell. I mean, I’m only talking about it to you because you are one. I haven’t told anyone else about Scott and it’s been ten years. It’s cool.”

“Cool.” Derek’s eyes narrow.

“I think it’s cool but maybe for you, that’s the wrong word choice. Point is, relief, I have it. Thank you.”

“You are relieved I’m,” Derek looks around. It’s almost 7 on a Sunday morning but no one is listening to them. People care more about themselves than they do about the patrons at the next table. “A wolf.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says with sigh. “God. Yeah, I am. I’m really glad.” He sets down his fork and on impulse, reaches across the table and covers Derek’s wrist with his hand. “I mean, I don’t really get it, the appeal of what you were doing. That’s your business. I just know that for some reason I started caring about whether or not you were all right.”

Derek stares down at Stiles’s hand for the longest time. Or it feels that way at least. He doesn’t pull away. He just sits frozen with his warm skin beneath Stiles’s hand so he starts to move his thumb, a gentle back and forth stroke along the inside of Derek’s arm. After what feels like an eternity, Derek lets out a shuddering exhale.

“I’m not.”

It’s just two words, but they sounds like they are ripped from his throat with metal tongs. Stiles doesn’t ask what he means. He knows from the way Derek’s eyes are fixed on where their skin touches, the table top, the melting ice cream. Derek is not all right.

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Derek agrees.

“Agreed then - clinic bad. No wolves in the clinic,” Stiles muses, tracing the fragile bones inside Derek’s wrist. “So, you’ve got plenty of time to finish your pie though.”

Derek shoves the pie away with his free hand and sits back. He doesn’t pull away. “I’m good.”

“Right. Me too. In that, I mean I am also done and finished,” Stiles fishes a few crumpled bills out of his pocket and drops them on the table.

He expects Derek to pull his hand away after that. Bill paid, lycanthropy acknowledged, interaction complete. That would be Derek’s cue to get up and to walk out, but he doesn’t. He leaves his arm right where it is on the table, under Stiles’s hand as a point of warm gentle contact that his strange eyes are fixed on.

Stiles is at a loss for words, an actual, literal loss for words. When he tells Scott and Allison, they’re going to shit bricks because that’s happened less than a handful of times in the last decade. But truly, Stiles can’t think of a thing to say. He’s entranced by the slight downward turn of Derek’s full mouth and the feel of smooth skin sliding beneath the pad of his thumb.

“Yeah. I’ll take you home,” Derek says finally, and Stiles doesn’t protest. He can tell this isn’t an offer that is made lightly. Keeping his hold on Derek’s wrist, Stiles lets Derek lead him out of the restaurant.

“So, this is weird,” Stiles explodes. He only made it three blocks towards his apartment before words exploded out of him and that’s not half bad, right? He doesn’t think so. Especially not since they’re sort of, kind of, almost holding hands. He’s got his fingers around Derek’s wrist which is close enough.

Maybe more intimate because they were strangers in a the shadowed corner of a bathhouse back room a few hours ago. Now, it’s Sunday morning. They’re in daylight on a crowded street. They could be anyone--normal people just like anyone else with the misfortune of being awake before noon on a weekend - instead of a guy who went looking for some strange and the werewolf, anonymous-sex-seeking guy found in the center of an orgy.

“You’re making it weird.”

“I’m holding your hand. That’s weird.”

“You’re not holding my hand. You’re holding my wrist, and if you stop talking about it, it will stop being weird.”

Stiles stops on the sidewalk. Derek stops too, has to, attached as they are and watches as Stiles slides his hand down until their palms are pressed together. Then Stiles laces their fingers together and holds up their hands. “See? Holding hands.”

“I mentioned that you’re strange right?” Derek asks, smiling a little bit bewildered.

“You said not normal.”

“Well you’re not normal, but you’re strange too.”

“Uhuh. Say that again when the moon is full and you’re walking in the skin of a wolf, fuzzybutt.”

Derek snorts.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, seriously, tell me. What?”

“It’s just-,” He shakes his head. Derek’s little almost smile is fucking radiant in sunshine, almost reflective. “Of all the insults people have thrown my way over the course of my life, I think fuzzybutt is the most creative.”

“Fuzzybutt’s not an insult,” Stiles protests, bumping his shoulder against Derek’s broader one. “It’s an observation of fact. Well it will be in like ten days. Nothing wrong with having a fuzzy butt, unless that’s why you’re so into waxing.” He gives Derek’s arm a tug. He can feel his eyes going huge in his face with curiosity. “Dude, is that why you wax?”

“I can’t just like it?”

“You can. Do you?”

“I’m not going to answer that.”

“Aw, come on,” Stiles whines, swinging their hands between them. “Tell me.”

“Which station will get you home again?”

“The next one. We’re like two traffic lights away.” Derek nods and makes a little hmmming noise in the back of his throat. Stiles likes the feel of his fingers. Likes a lot of things about Derek, even if most of them do raise more questions than answers.

They don’t talk again until they reach the station. Somehow, they’ve turned so that now they stand face to face. Stiles realizes for the first time that they’re actually about the same height. In fact, he might have half an inch or so on Derek. It makes him feel oddly brave. “I’m going to see you again, yeah?”

“I’m at Hard Rick’s Fridays and Saturdays usually,” Derek says with a shrug. “I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”

“Okay. I’ll, um, see you around and we can have drama-free post-party pie maybe.”

“Maybe.”

Stiles smiles at that, one of his huge dopey ones but he doesn’t care. Derek hasn’t looked away and he’s still holding his hand. They’re standing so close that Stiles can smell apples, cinnamon, vanilla and maybe just a hint of come that gargled hot water and a glass of milk didn’t wash away. His powerful body radiates heat. If pressed, Stiles will say it’s the heat that makes him duck his head and press a small kiss to Derek’s mouth.

It lasts a whole three seconds before Derek’s lips part on a little gasp. He really does taste mostly like that pie and that skin-saliva taste that isn’t really anything, but can feel (and right now does) like everything good on earth. Stiles breaks the kiss before tongues enter the equation, because things are complicated, backwards even. Derek squeezes his hand before Stiles dares to pull back and Stiles knows it’s okay.

“I’ll see you Friday, probably,” Stiles says, jerking his head at the stairs leading to the platform.

“Yeah, probably will.” Derek unlaces their fingers and takes a step back. “Have a good morning Stiles,” Derek says before shoving the hand that tangled with Stiles’s moments before into the pocket of his jacket. He turns and walks back in the opposite direction and Stiles doesn’t mind that Derek doesn’t look back.

Something is starting here. It’s terrifying and awesome and sexy and kind of sweet. Stiles is texting Scott before he’s slid into a seat on the train. He’s fucking psyched.

~*~*~

Stiles wishes he smoked. Not because he's pro-smoking or because he thinks it looks cool, even though he secretly does think it looks cool. He knows that’s not PC, because it makes your breath stink and your teeth yellow and will kill you and those around you - slowly. Only he finds it hot anyway, because John Hamm is infinitely sexier with a cigarette dangling from his fingers on Mad Men than without. And so is Christina Hendricks.

The thing is, Stiles kind of has this oral fixation and smoking might stop him from chewing his nails. Also, it would give him something to do with his hands while he stands here, leaned against the ragged stone exterior of Hard Rick’s. The place doesn’t open for another twenty minutes and he could be screwing around on his iPhone, but he’s a little hopeful and a lot vigilant and he doesn’t want to miss it if Derek shows up.

Instead of texting or playing Scrabble with his dad long-distance, he sticks to listening to the 10th anniversary full cast recording of American Gods. It leaves his eyes free to scan up and down the street for half an hour until Derek appears instead - just around the time that Shadow and Mr. Wednesday get to Chicago and meet Chernobog and the three Zoryas. He yanks his headphones out of his phone and shoves them into his back pocket, even though Shadow is talking to the one of the Zoryas on a rooftop, so he can give his full focus to Derek’s approach.

Walking towards Hard Rick's, hands in his jacket pockets, Derek is the picture of a modern day Fonzi. It’s an image Stiles deposits directly into his spank bank for later withdrawal. The shirt he’s wearing under the leather jacket is a pale grey tonight and his jeans are a blue so faded, they look almost white in the waxing moonlight. Instead of boots, he’s wearing a pair of sneakers that were probably white once, before Derek wore them into an ugly gray-brown dirt color borne of overuse.

For some reason, that last detail leaves Stiles feeling charmed. He’s a sucker for a well-loved item of clothing, even if he’s got on a pair of sandals he stole from Scott because that floor? Just no.

“Hi!” Stiles calls, waving a little too wildly. Before he can kick himself for his over enthusiastic greeting, Derek does it with an eye roll.

“Why am I not surprised?”

“This is almost a date,” Stiles retorts. “You should’ve been expecting me.”

Derek rolls his shoulders. He looks like he’s trying to shake something off, like an insect or maybe a bad chill thats run down his spine.

“This is not a date.”

“I know. Thats why I said almost. It’s an adjective. I have a dictionary app if you want to use it to look it up.” Derek glares at him. Stiles beams back. He likes a challenge. Sue him. “I knew you were more than just another pretty face. So, um, how do you do this?”

“Usually, I go inside first,” Derek answers drily.

“Maybe I was waiting for you to open the door for me.”

Derek rolls his eyes, but does hold the door until Stiles slips inside. He pays for both of their entrance fees before Stiles can protest though and that makes it feel a little like a date; a weird, pervy, sex-drenched date but still a date. They walk into he locker room attendant, who stops Stiles to get his ID number and name, while he greets Derek by name and lets him stroll right on in like he owns the place. The attendant guy seems to get that they came together because he unlocks a locker near Derek.

This close, Stiles can’t help but watch as Derek drops the combination lock on one of the benches that bisect the aisles of lockers. Apparently, Derek doesn’t need to give any information because he doesn’t just have his own locker, he has his own lock. Stiles undresses slower than he ever has in his life as he watches Derek strip with a military efficiency, kicking his shoes underneath the lockers themselves. He feels hypnotized as Derek pulls out a towel, dark blue and much larger than the white one inside Stiles’s locker, and something round and plastic that joins his lock on the bench with a thunk.

Derek spreads out the towel before he places a knee down, and reaches for the plastic thing which turns out to be a tub of actual Boy Butter, which, it turns out is a real thing. No, seriously. It’s actually called Boy Butter, with a logo, a scanner bar, and everything. Watching Derek’s long fingers unscrew the top makes Stiles acutely aware that container is half empty. The thought makes him sort of freeze halfway through stepping out of his boxers next to the sight of gloriously naked Derek and his ginormous container of lube.

Derek stares at him until that creeping feeling of eyes on skin shakes Stiles out of his reverie. He kicks off his specifically-chosen-because-they-were-an-unembarrassing-black-and-red-plaid boxers and then picks them up, holding them defensively over his crotch. “Can I help you with something?”

Derek smirks and holds out the container. “Yeah. That’d be great.”

Stiles just stares at it. “That’s a big jar of lube, man.”

“I know,” Derek says in a tone of voice that clearly says that he thinks that Stiles is not only annoying, but also dumber than a post. He shakes it a little at Stiles when he doesn’t take it. “You need to use it if you’re going to help me prep.”

Oh. 

Ooooh. Stiles does not get hard right then and there. Nope, because that would be humiliating. He just keeps hold of his boxers because it seems expedient.

He does take the lube with the other hand though, because he’s never one to miss an opportunity when presented. And, oh God, as soon as Stiles gets his hands free, Derek is doing exactly that. He’s got both palms planted on the bench and is fucking presenting. He has the most perfect, bitable, fuckable ass Stiles has ever seen in his life and it’s just there, waiting for Stiles.

“Are you going to do this or not?” Derek demands. “Jesus, what are you? Hourly?”

“I was just, uh, trying to figure out where to start.”

“Two fingers is fine,” Derek says like they’re discussing what to get on a pizza, not what technique Stiles should use to finger him with. “Just make sure you get as much as you can inside me. It’s not about the stretch. I just don’t want to risk drying out mid-fuck. Come and spit aren’t nature’s lubes, no matter what porn says.”

Right. That makes perfect sense. Stiles can see the reasoning there, he thinks as he unscrews the lid and finds the lube really does have a texture almost like butter inside - thicker than most of what he’s ever used but still slick and easy when he pushes his coated fingers against Derek’s hole. Derek doesn’t even grunt that first time and, okay, normally Stiles would be against double dipping in a situation like this, but clearly this is Derek’s personal supply, so fuck it. He pulls his index and middle finger out before he can allow himself to notice how tight or how warm Derek is and scoops out, what he thinks, is a truly obscene amount of lube.

It’d be enough to butter at least two slices of bread, he figures. At least it would, if you kept running with the ridiculous butter analogy. Stiles does, because he’s already down the rabbit hole and past the “Eat me/Drink me” portion. He doesn’t see a reason to keep his mind from wandering farther into the twisting undergrowth at this stage.

Stiles drops his boxers so he can have both hands free to work. He can hear Derek draw in a breath as he shifts his weight onto the bench. Stiles just knows that it’s going to be used to say something bitchy aimed in his general direction. Instead, he smears the lube thickly down Derek’s crack, making sure it’s thickest over his hole. He’s done this before.

Well, he’s fingerfucked guys before. He’s usually doing it during a blowjob or as foreplay, before he and whoever he’s in bed with fuck - for pleasure, for preparation, for each other. So he’s done the act but this is different.

Derek is reacting like this is a chore even as Stiles’ fingers glide in and out, pushing in more lube with every pass just like he was asked. He's being good and Derek is behaving like he’s providing as much a service as the locker attendant. Maybe less.

That pisses Stiles off. He’s good at this, damnit. He spent two semi-serious boyfriends and one extended semester abroad fling learning how to be good at this. He loves fingering guys, loves being in control enough to watch them fall apart from the inside out. That this beautiful man is behaving like Stiles asked him to do the dishes is so infuriating, Stiles drags more lube out of the jar and smears it on top of his fingers before adding his ring finger and pinky to the mix at the same time without warning.

Despite the funny name, Boy Butter actually is good stuff because his hand sinks into the knuckle on an ease slide. Despite the lack of resistance, it still knocks the air out of Derek’s lungs and Stiles gets a moan out of him for the first time, one of the low growling ones he heard before. He lets out another louder and sharper cry when Stiles gives another twist of his wrist that would be far too rough and too much, for most people.

Not for Derek. He’ll heal. He can take it. Hell, he wants to take it. Stiles is sure now, as he leans over his broad, warm back so he can watch Derek’s hands. They’re curled into fists as Stiles hand pumps in and out of him. 

“You think you’re wet enough yet?” Stiles asks, half tease half genuine. He’s not one to leave a job half finished.

“No,” Derek grits out.

“You mean you need to be wetter inside? Make sure you’re dripping before anyone even gets their hands on you? Need them to know how hungry your hole is before they even touch you?”

“Don’t try and Dom me, Stiles,” Derek grits out.

“I’m not Domming you. I’m asking you questions. You don’t have to answer. I’m already doing what you asked. See?” He does as he promises then, pulling out to smear more lube on his hand to work inside Derek. He strokes firmly over Derek’s prostate with the pads of his fingers until his legs are vibrating, just to prove his point. “Just getting you wet like you wanted.”

“Yeah?” Derek challenges. But the word comes out thin as a breeze, so Stiles doesn’t feel too worried.

“Then shut up and let me open you up,” Stiles chides, sliding back in. Derek’s body takes him all the way up to the knuckles, clenching and unclenching around the very top of Stiles palm and he uses his other hand to work in more lube. It’s slimy and greasy and Stiles wants to sink inside Derek and never come out. 

“God, look at that. The way you just take it.” If he thought he could get away with it, he’d lean down and press his mouth to the stretched rim of Derek’s hole, but he doesn’t dare. Instead, he glides his thumb around the strained skin until it’s shiny and slick.

“Need it wet. Need it loose. I’m,” Derek breaks off when Stiles rubs across his prostate again, “Oh fuck, I’m good. You got me so open, Stiles.”

“You sure?” Stiles offers blandly, like his own dick isn’t hard and aching against Derek’s leg. “I think you could probably take my fist if you wanted, like as a warm up stretch - sort of like doing yoga before a run.”

Derek makes a noise in the back of his throat that Stiles might call a whimper. Might, but doesn’t, because Derek shakes his head and is already taking a deep breath, composing himself. The sound is swallowed by the sound of the club getting louder around them. “Nn-nh. I’m good.”

Stiles can’t help being disappointed as he pulls his fingers out of Derek’s hole because, well, he’s beautiful and tight and he’d been writhing under Stiles seconds ago. Stiles doesn’t know what he needs to do to get that back but he’s here now. He’ll figure it out. He’s already getting an idea as he watches Derek straighten, a few stray streaks of lube making slow, shiny trails down his thighs that he purposely ignores.

Derek stops on his way out of the locker room and puts his hand on the arm of every guy he passes, leaning forward to whisper in their ear. It’s an invitation of course. Stiles, for his part, follows Derek like a shadow and settles in a dark corner and watches as Derek lays out his own towel then covers it with two of the clubs white ones before laying down on his back, body sprawled artfully limp and open.

It takes less than five minutes for the first guy to find Derek and from there word travels fast. He’s surrounded in less than fifteen and the room, which before had been empty, is now filled with wet slapping sounds of skin against skin. Most of it is hands working on dicks. But there’s the distinct sound of thighs hitting ass when the man fucking Derek slams into him, drawing out a slightly gagged groan each time whoever’s fucking Derek’s throat pushes in too deep.

Again, Derek is hard. This time though, Stiles sees someone reach for his dick and Derek catches him by the wrist and pulls him down. He pulls off the cock he’s sucking and whispers something into the ear of the man who made a move to get him off before shoving him away. The man stumbles back, stunned, before making his way over to Stiles.

“Hey,” he says and Stiles nods in acknowledgement. “He says if I wanted to get someone off, I should blow you so, uh, you wanna?”

Stiles stares at him. He’s in his late thirties, no ring, dishwater hair, nice enough features. There’s nothing wrong with this guy. This is the kind of guy Stiles would’ve hooked up with last time if he hadn’t met Derek.

So fuck Derek. Yeah. Yes. He will take that blow job, thanks. “Sure,” Stiles says warmly and expects them to leave the room, but instead Dishwater maneuvers him over to the padded area and pushes him down beside the crowd. This low and close, Stiles has a perfect view of Derek’s face to go with the hot, wet suction of Dishwater’s mouth. He groans and pets the man’s hair even though his eyes are locked on Derek as the first of the group comes on his beautiful face.

Stiles expects something there - since Derek clearly does this so often. Bliss maybe? Release? He’s definitely hard, no question. When the streaks of white hit his face, his eyes roll back then drift shut and his whole body goes bowstring tight, it’s not an orgasm. His body loosens and resumes its brutal pace before his expression twists, seeming almost fractured. What has to be an involuntary tear forces itself out past his closed lids, even as he licks his lips and opens his mouth for the next in line to take his place.

Coming to that sight causes almost as much hurt as it does pleasure for Stiles. He only just manages to pull out in time to avoid coming in Dishwater’s mouth. He offers to return the favor but he's waved off. He’s not looking for that, which is just another mindfuck if you ask Stiles, the things guys look for in places like this.

He stays by Derek the whole night and the traffic never goes away. It eases up some, the spectators fading to only two or three instead of a full crowd for awhile. When it does, Stiles moves to sit on bended knee or on top of his feet next to the scene. Derek isn’t in there; he’s not in his body the way he was at the diner or in the locker room. This is nothing but a shell that looks like Derek; his spirit is hidden so deep inside, it's invisible. Stiles might have only known him for two nights, but he feels protective of what’s inside. So he reaches out and takes the hand closest to him and laces Derek’s fingers with his on his lap.

Derek grunts and shifts a little. It sends the man fucking him in deeper, at a different angle, and Derek makes a noise half an octave higher than before. His hips jerk and buck, and his head turns away from Stiles then back, jostling the dick in his mouth free so it rests on his cheek instead of between his fuck-bruised lips.

Derek blinks and sees Stiles and Stiles shrugs because the light is low, and he doesn’t know what to say or what to do. He knows that Derek could rip these men in half if he wanted, but instead he lets a hand twist in his hair and yank him back into place before shoving back into his mouth with force that would hurt a human. The sight is enough to make Stiles lift their joined hands up to his chest and bend his head to press his lips to Derek’s knuckles in a gesture that is not exactly a kiss. Stiles couldn’t say why he does it, but Derek squeezes his hand back and the gesture makes his heart do a flip in his chest so violent that his thing for Lydia Martin in high school looks like puppy love by comparison.

Holy shit, he’s in so much trouble. He’s screwed if all it takes for him to feel so completely ass over tits about a guy is to hold his hand while two strangers fuck him raw. Seriously, just totally and completely fucked, because a guy who does this to himself to get himself out of whatever it is that’s driving him is probably bad news for Stiles, not to mention flat out emotionally unstable. He knows all of this and it doesn’t even matter a little bit, because over the course of the night Derek goes more and more limp all over his body.

Except for where he’s holding Stiles’s hand.

~*~*~

Derek gets summerberry pie this time, which is a seasonal specialty that shouldn’t even be on the freaking menu this late into August. He’s got the ice cream again. The pie filling actually makes this little noise when Derek cuts a piece off with his fork that reminds Stiles of the sound his fingers made pushing into Derek’s body. The berry juice on his lips paint them a little darker than his normal shade.

“It’s barely summer anymore, dude,” Stiles declares, because watching Derek orgasmically eat pie in slo-mo is all kinds of pink-berry-fucked-up.

“If I have to beat the A/C unit in my office with a wrench every afternoon, it’s still summer. ”

“A wrench, huh? That big ol’ fist of yours not getting the job done?”

Derek lifts an eyebrow. “Yeah. That's it exactly. Because shifting at my job is the best idea ever.”

“Hey, some offices have doors that close.”

“Not mine when I’m in it. Office hours are basically whenever I’m there.” He has another bite of pie. “I teach.”

“You teach,” Stiles echoes and suddenly his head is flooded with images of Derek in the stereotypical teacher garb: sweater vests over collared shirts with loosened ties and plastic-frame glasses. Gangbangs may not be Stiles’ thing but the hot teacher thing really, really is. “What do you teach?”

“Mostly world literature classes that dipshits take to fulfill their multicultural credit requirements. They don’t want to be there. It’s all business majors or asshole lacrosse players laughing through the queer elements in Kiss of the Spider Woman instead of students who actually want to talk about the gender identity themes, or the tradition of hallucination in literature as a depiction of the mind’s natural inclination to adapt in a traumatic event.” He pokes at his now empty plate, forlorn at the very idea of his students. “I need more pie.” Derek waves his fork in the air to get the waitress’ attention. 

"I played lacrosse in high school," Stiles blurts a second before Sarah arrives. He’s grateful for that because honestly, too much dead air and he could dig himself a nice deep hole. Bad enough that Derek is gorgeous and the most insanely intense power bottom Stiles has ever met, he’s also clearly passionate to boot. And, you know, an English professor. Stiles is willing to lay money on him owning at least one sweater vest. He will do almost anything to see it.

When the waitress leaves with their order and Derek finishes his rant as if he never stopped. “I did my doctoral thesis on witchcraft’s use as a metaphor for fear of sexuality in literature. If I can hold on until I get tenure, then I get to teach what I want and bring the focus to horror as a form of legitimate literature through the ages, from religion and folklore prior to Gothic horror up through Steven King and the creation of the torture porn genre.”

Stiles holds up a hand because there’s a word in there that is sticking in his brain. “I’m sorry. Did you say your doctoral thesis? You’re working on a doctoral thesis?”

Derek shakes his head. “I did my thesis back east. I’m an adjunct professor.”

“With a doctorate. You have a PhD. And you are a doctor.”

Derek shrugs and looks around the restaurant. He’s clearly looking for the pie and also anywhere but at Stiles. “I just took a lot of classes.”

“You’re Dr. Derek Hale.”

“Technically yeah.”

Stiles sits back into the cushion of the booth and stares at his plate because who the hell is this guy, seriously. How did a werewolf doctor who taught English end up getting gangfucked every weekend, followed by the world's most ridiculous post-orgy meal of pie and more pie? Stiles wonders if his ears are smoking like one of those overheating robots faced with something that just does not compute.

In the end, the waitress saves them again when she returns with more pie for Derek. “I wish I knew how to eat like that and have a body like yours,” she says. She winks as she scoops up the dirty dishes.

Derek gives her an awkward look that probably started out as something like a smile and mumbles his thanks with an added shrug. It’s fucking adorable is what it is.

Stiles reaches across the table and takes Derek’s hand, like he did the last time they were together, laced fingers and dry palms. “You’re a dork, you know that?”

That gets an expression even closer to a smile and another awkward shrug. “I’ve heard that.” His cheeks turn a little pink. “It’s just usually from my sister.”

“You have a sister and you’re a dork. This makes your whole Zoolander-really-really-impossibly-good-looking thing way less intimidating. You’re more of a person and less of a Bernini given life.”

“And having half of that hand inside me didn’t take away some of the jitters?” Derek asks. The eyebrow dip is back. Stiles is starting to hate that expression. It means he’s throwing up walls with his obscenities and the whorish behavior that he thinks scares people away.

Objectively, Stiles realizes that his whole slightly-soulless cumsdumpster cocklsut persona probably does scare most people away. If that side doesn’t scare people away, the English nerd whose career revolves around books, study of books, and talking about books can’t help. Most people just aren’t equipped to handle someone being both devastatingly beautiful and brilliant enough for the word “doctor” to go before their name without running away screaming. That much awesome in one place can be intimidating.

Then again, most people didn’t have their best friends turn into a werewolf when they were sixteen as a huge mind-opener either. They also probably didn’t start out looking for porn and end up on websites talking about sex positivity and slut shaming. They definitely weren’t enamored of Lydia for all of high school like Stiles was, watching brains beyond extraordinary beauty make the entire town brighter just by existing and learning how to be just friends with her despite it. So yeah. The tactics Derek uses to push people away isn’t gonna work this time.

“No.” He takes a fortifying breath before continuing. “If anything, that made them worse because now I know how good you feel inside. Are you still so tight because of the healing powers or just because you’re you?”

Derek swallows and Stiles can see all the muscles around his Adam’s apple working. He wants to fuck Derek right here, bent over this table, on top of the pie and the bacon and eggs, spilling coffee everywhere. He settles for running his thumb over Derek’s knuckles then back. “Fess up. Enquiring minds wanna know.”

“I don’t know. I was born this way.”

“If you’re going to talk to me in Lady Gaga lyrics I may not be able to control myself. I’m so sorry, I’m so s-s-sorry.”

Derek doesn’t even blink. His eyebrows though, his eyebrows convey everything an incredulous blink could and more. “Stiles.”

“Is that your poker face? P-p-p-p-poker face.”

“Stiles.”

“Cause I can’t read your, I can’t read your, I can’t read your poker face.”

“Seriously, I will kill you if you don’t stop.”

“Well see, that is right out of both the Telephone and Bad Romance video.”

Derek looks like he’s going to say something, but instead he uses what Stiles is totally sure is werewolf speed to grab the front of Stiles’ shirt and yank him across the table. It knocks over Stiles’s soda but it brings Stiles into contact with Derek’s mouth so holy crap, who even cares? Not Stiles, that’s for sure. He is busy opening his mouth for Derek’s tongue. The kiss is so gentle compared with the rough way Derek pulled him forward, but contrasts seem to be Derek’s forté, so Stiles just sinks into it, kissing back slowly. Whimpering and burying his free hand in Derek’s hair, the other breaks free of Derek’s grip to brace his weight in the remains of the summerberry pie. It squishes under his hand but he doesn’t mind. He feels like if he kisses Derek like this long enough, deep yet easy, Stiles will finally figure him out.

Then Derek pulls back, looking from Stiles’s mouth up to his eyes then back down again, all the way down to the table. Blunt fingernails getting a little too sharp on the back of Stiles’s neck for just an instant (which could be an awesome werewolf aspect to experiment with in private) before they’re gone again. Stiles feels cold as Derek sinks back into his booth, eyes closed tightly. Stiles sits back and wipes red berry filling off his hand and just watches Derek breathe. Stiles can’t help but marvel at how Derek looks more undone now than he did in the club, naked, fucked out, and used up.

“Fuck,” Derek breathes and when his eyes open they’ve gone blue. Not regular blue, but bright blue like the neon bulbs of the Hard Rick’s sign are lighting them up from inside. Werewolf blue the way Scott’s eyes glow gold on full moons. “I’m just-,” he shakes his head and the blue eyes are gone, replaced by human green that doesn’t hide his inner turmoil one little bit.

“So happy I could die?” Stiles offers. Derek groans and drags his hand down over his face. Stiles grins. He can’t remember the last time he got kissed like that. Has he ever been kissed like that? He doesn’t think so. “I’m exaggerating on the death part,” he adds, “But not on the rest of it.”

“We should leave now,” Derek says. He’s already got his wallet out and is fishing through it for bills. Stiles can see a few credit cards, but instead he comes out with three slightly wrinkled bills which he sets on the table and slides beneath the pie. Stiles blinks, because Jesus Jones, are those fifties Derek just put down? There’s no way that their meal cost more than forty bucks even with insane amounts of pie and a generous tip.

“Derek, are you serious?” For Stiles, that’s more than half a week’s paycheck at the library. After taxes anyway. There is no way an adjunct professor can make that kind of money, can he? Stiles flat out asked his law professor once how much he made as a professor - because he was an invasive little bastard - and she’d just laughed and said sixty grand, which was nice but she had tenure and even then, it definitely wasn’t _make it rain, beotches_ money. “I mean, yes the food industry’s an abomination when it comes to wage rights but that’s a lot.”

“We made a mess,” he says with a shrug and eyes the door, reinforcing his desire to go. Right, yeah, because of the mess, his eyebrows say with silent eloquence.

Right. Stiles wipes his mouth with his napkin and rises first with Derek beside him a moment later. Stiles almost takes his hand but stops himself because he doesn’t want to read the situation wrong. He’s been doing pretty good so far and he wants to keep the winning streak going. So instead he just drifts a little so that his shoulder bumps Derek’s as they walk out the door together.

Derek accepts that as a signal and before Stiles knows what’s happening, he’s being pushed up against the wall by lean muscle and warm skin. He expects to be kissed or blown, or maybe to be pushed down to his knees to do the blowing but instead Derek is just…breathing.

He’s standing pressed tightly against him, with his nose pressed up under Stiles’s ear and his mouth against Stiles’s jaw taking in long shuddering breaths. It’s not sexual but something tells Stiles that it would take very little change in circumstance for it to become so.

Without thought, Stiles’ arms wind around Derek’s back. “You okay?”

This is a case of Stilinski Dumb Luck for the win because Derek sinks into the hug and sags against him. He wraps his arms around Stiles’s back and says “You fuck with my head,” on one long exhale.

Stiles smoothes his right hand up to cup the back of Derek’s neck, rubbing the hair at his nape. “I’m sorry. No more Lady Gaga from now on,” Stiles promises.

“Not that. I don’t- I’m not- I wasn’t looking for any of this.”

“This being good conversation, great kisses, awesome pie and adjacent, sometimes interconnected sex acts?”

“I-Yeah. Yeah. This.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t make it bad does it? That we found each other, I mean. It’s good. I like it. Don’t you?”

Derek doesn’t say anything. He just keeps clinging as he breathes, hot and wet against Stiles' neck. Stiles isn’t an expert in psychology or anything, but he’s not so stupid that he can’t spot serious damage when he sees it and Derek has it. Stiles just doesn’t care because every time he looks at Derek, or talks to him, or touches him, he falls a little in love with him. That freaks him out, because enough little falls will equal one all-the-way falling in love with Derek if he’s not paying attention. Hell, it may happen even if his attention is laser focused.

“Come home with me,” Stiles murmurs, petting the back of Derek’s neck like he’s seen Allison do to Scott a thousand times. It always works on Scott and the way Derek relaxes even more, it seems to work on him too.

“I don’t know,” Derek says. He sounds so young. Stiles would hold him tighter if he weren’t concerned about what that might knock loose right here on the street. “Stiles, I don’t want to fuck now.”

“I know. It’s so late it's early and it’s Saturday. Come home with me and sleep.”

Derek nods against his neck and they lean against each other as they move towards the edge of the sidewalk. Fuck public transit. Stiles flags down a taxi and maneuvers them both inside, then back out when they reach the brownstone he shares with Scott and Allison. “There’s another wolf here,” Derek growls and Stiles nods.

“I told you about my friend, Scott. He got turned when we were teenagers. He and his wife live downstairs. I have upstairs. Ignore it. Smell me instead or something.”

Stiles doesn’t know why he’s surprised when Derek does exactly that. He wraps his arms around Stiles’s chest from behind, and inhales deeply at the spot right behind his ear even as they climb the stairs. Turns out that makes walking seriously difficult. It also turns out that Stiles could give less than a shit because it feels really good to have Derek all up against his back like that.

It also means he doesn’t have to worry about guiding Derek to his bedroom. He walks and Derek goes with him, attached like an extra set of limbs, into his room and then onto his bed, not letting go, only loosening his grip when Stiles turns in his arms and sets to work on his belt.

“Stiles. I- I’m-“

He cuts Derek off because he knows what Derek is going to say. Or rather, what he’s trying to say. Stiles isn’t looking for what Derek’s making a fumbling protest against and that’s okay. That’s not what Stiles is doing anyway. “I don’t know if you’re tired, but I’ve been up since six a.m. yesterday which means I’ve been up for like 26 hours, so I’m exhausted,” Stiles declares, undoing the button on Derek’s jeans then unzipping the fly. “And I’m going to sleep and since I figure you’re coming with me, these have to come off. I’m not sleeping with jeans in my bed. You can borrow some of my boxers or sweat pants.”

Derek doesn’t say anything. He stands there and allows Stiles to push his pants down his legs, always keeping at least one hand on Stiles. He doesn’t break contact as he shrugs out of his jacket or when he worms his way out of his shirt. Stiles is about to go for his dresser or closet when Derek lets go of him to slip between the sheets, curled in on himself, just a little - his body making a zigzag shape rather than curled up fetal and okay. Naked Derek in his bed. Naked Derek in his bed, trusting him to…not. Just not. Stiles figures he can return the favor.

Also, he knows scent and touch are big werewolfy deals. Scott talked about it all the time when he and Allison first got together. No, really, _all_ the time. Stiles had actually stabbed Scott’s hand with a fork once to get him to stop (What? He knew he’d heal.) and he still talked about it. So he strips efficiently out of his own clothes and climbs into bed facing Derek, grateful that he graduated from a twin to a queen when he graduated from college to law school. There’s more than enough room for them to lie face to face like this, their knees touching and feet tangling together.

“This is strange,” Derek says finally. His voice is the sort of whisper usually saved for the darkness of late nights, but the sun is sneaking in through the blinds and curtains on Stiles’ south-facing window.

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees in the same hushed tone. “But strange is working for me right now.”

“I’ve never done this before.”

“Done what?”

“Slept with someone.”

It’s on the tip of Stiles tongue to argue with him. After all, hello, scant hours ago they were up to their elbows in sweat and lube and come and writhing bodies, most of them on, over, or inside of Derek. Luckily, his mind is faster than his mouth for once and he doesn’t mention any of that. Because of course. Sleep. Derek means actual sleep like the kissing and the interlaced fingers clearly hold so much more meaning for Derek than fucking. It makes something warm and soft unfurl inside Stiles and he scoots closer, working one of his legs between Derek’s so that their bodies are nestled closer together. Derek seems to take that as an invitation because he drapes his arm across Stiles until they fit chest to chest with Derek’s supernaturally strong arm anchored around Stiles waist.

“It’s just sleeping.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, and if you happen to have one of those chasing rabbits puppy dreams, don’t kick me, okay?” Stiles says, because dog jokes. Always a winner with the werewolf set. Derek pinches his side and Stiles does not squeak. He makes a very manful noise of surprise that happens to be in a register only dolphins can hear, is all.

The smirk on Derek’s lips is asshole levels of smug. Jackson on his worst day smug. Stiles should not find it endearing. The fact that he’s so charmed that he ducks forward to gently kiss the corner of said jerk-faced grin and doesn’t mind when Derek covers his face with his palm and gives him a gentle shove, only proves how screwed he is. “Sleep now,” Derek groans, dropping his arm back over Stiles higher up now, stroking his back along his spine.

“Good plan,” Stiles says on a yawn so huge it makes his jaw pop. After that he doesn’t remember much, just his soft bed, Derek’s warm body, and the soft rhythm of a hand moving back and forth on his skin.

~*~*~

Stiles comes to at the sound of quiet yet frantic knocking on his door and the sound of someone hissing his name. He groans and twists only to find himself tangled up in limbs and sheets. Blinking awake, Stiles finds himself looking across the field of pillows directly into Derek’s strange green eyes with their halo of gold at the center.

“You’ve got company,” Derek says. He has absolutely no inflection and his face is a handsome yet blank mask. All of it goes towards giving Stiles absolutely nothing to work with.

Ah, well. He’s done more with less. He scoots forward so that he can press his mouth to Derek’s. Stiles worries that the maybe blankness of his face meant that Derek had slid back into that sad, empty, desperate part of himself while they were sleeping. After all, it was how they’d met and the way they’d spent half the night. Only Derek’s whole body seems to soften as he opens his lips to the kiss. Stiles doesn’t even pretend to hold back the sigh of relief he breathes between them.

Of course that doesn't stop the knocking. “Stiles!” Scott calls through the door. “Dude, Stiles, come out already.”

Stiles pulls back and rolls his eyes. “I have to-“

“Yeah I can hear,” Derek agrees. 

“But don’t move. Seriously. Stay just like that,” Stiles declares as he rolls off the bed and stumbles backwards towards the door. “I’m getting back into bed and you need to be exactly where you are.” He opens the door and glares at his best friend. “What, Scott? What could you possibly want?”

Scott stares at him, all floppy hair and puppy dog eyes. “You’re naked.”

“You did not nearly break my door down for that.”

“Yeah but, dude, put some pants on or something.”

Stiles shakes his head. “Nope. Don’t think so. I think I’m going to stand here, au naturale, until you tell me what’s so important that it had to pull me away from the countless things I could’ve been doing while naked.”

Horror, disgust, then more horror flashes across Scott’s face before he collects himself. Honestly, Stiles loves him, would die for him, but sometimes it’s hard to believe that Stiles is the one with attention-deficit in their dynamic duo.

“There’s another wolf here. I can smell them in the building, maybe next door? I wanted to check and make sure you were okay before I went to check it out.”

“He’s naked too,” Stiles says.

Scott blinks. “What?”

“The other werewolf. He’s naked too. And also in my bed, where I should still be. So you can calm down and go back downstairs, maybe make your wife breakfast in bed since you’re up at this ungodly hour and leave me, said other werewolf and our nudity alone.”

“Dude, its, like, three in the afternoon.”

“I stand by my statement.”

“So you brought home another werewolf-“

“His name is Derek.”

“Knowing that he was a werewolf,” Scott continues as if Stiles had never spoken. Scott pulls out the full pout, protruding lower lip and everything. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

No. No, he’s not going to fall to the distressed Scott-puppy face. Not this time. “So, I’m supposed to brief you on my dates now?”

Scott throws his hands up. “When you’re dating a werewolf you are!”

“I don’t judge you for your lupine heritage. Your internalized lycanthrophobia isn’t my problem.”

“Internalized lycanthrophobia is not a thing.”

“Yeah, it is or you wouldn’t be so grumpy about me bringing Derek home.”

“Stiles, seriously!”

“Seriously?” Stiles echoes. Incredulity, it’s just one of the many services he’s offering this morning. Well, afternoon technically. “You’re the one who said I was too enmeshed in your life, remember? I’m trying to maintain my boundaries here.”

“You came with me and Allison on our honeymoon.”

“Yeah, because you idiots got married right before we all did our semester abroad in Paris. Don’t get pissed off at me because you didn’t bother to fill out change of housing requests. That wasn’t my job.”

“You were best man. That’s totally under your job description.”

“No, it was not,” Stiles groans because holy shit how many times have they had this argument? He lost count after Scott and Allison’s second anniversary. She would know. She’s better at keeping track of these things. “Also not in the best man rulebook - finding wolfsbane rope for yours and Allison’s weird inverse Little Red Riding Hood sex games, and yet I did, Scott. I found and procured werewolf sex restraints for you in France, in French.”

“But we were in France to study French though,” Scott protests.

No, Stiles was in France to study French history and folklore as it pertained to the social beliefs and practices of pre-revolutionary French peasant culture, thanks. Anthropology had been his undergraduate degree. Not freaking French. So he ignores Scott because that argument is fascicle.

In the eternal wisdom of Lucille Bluth - he won't hear it and he won't respond to it. “And yet I did it. I used up a long weekend and went and got you your creepy werewolf sex-rope in the French Alps for which you still owe me. That witch almost turned me into a newt, Scott. A newt. I had suction fingers and a tongue that could touch my eyeball for two weeks.” Stiles points a finger at Scott “And I swear to god if you say ‘you got better’ in your terrible British accent I won’t end you, I will ask the hot naked werewolf in my bed to end you for me.”

“Later though,” Derek calls from the bed. “I’m really comfortable right now.”

“Later,” Stiles agrees. “He will kick your ass and end you for me later if you quote Monty Python at me now.”

Scott droops. “I only know that bit because you made me watch Holy Grail like seventy times freshman year.”

“And you’re a better man for it. Now if there’s nothing else?” Stiles asks, then waves down at his free-balling form.

“No. Nope. I’m good. You guys going to come down for dinner? It’s Sunday so, you know. Allison and spaghetti. There’s room for four. If you want.”

“Oh,” Stiles says because really, that’s all he has at the moment. He can’t make a commitment for or against Sunday Night Spaghetti with Derek until he and Derek actually talk. He wants to say yes. He wonders if Scott and Derek can smell that. “Well, good to know. Anything else?”

Scott shakes his head. “As you were, I guess. I’m just going to-“ And he’s gone, werewolf speed taking him away so fast that Stiles doesn’t even see him move. Stiles closes the door, locks it, and leans against it with a sigh. Across the room, Derek is staring at him and it draws him back to the bed like the Death Star’s tractor beam.

He clambers back beneath the covers and curls up again. This time he pulls the hand Derek has pillowed under his cheek to him and laces their fingers together. “So, pasta?”

Derek shrugs. “I can always eat.”

“Okay. Me too.”

“Here’s good for now.”

Stiles nods. “Yeah. I think so.”

Derek lifts their interlocked hands between them, twisting them this way and that, studying them intently. Between his eyebrows, a little divot of concentration appears.

“What are you doing?”

Derek squeezes his fingers then releases so that their fingertips are both limp and loose. “Looking for traces of leftover newt.” He drags the pad of Stiles forefinger over his lower lip. “I think they have suckers. Or webbing.”

“Actual newts have webbing, but I had suckers,” Stiles sighs. “Also some of them they have four digits and some of them are blue. Trust me.”

Derek snorts and covers his eyes with their joined hands. “Blue.”

“Blue with four fingers and slime.”

“Slime.”

“Yeah, it was toxic too.”

“Toxic,” Derek repeats and yes. That is definitely skepticism Stiles can hear in his tone.

“Okay semi-toxic.”

Derek uncovers his face and shifts so that he can quirk an eyebrow and open one eye. All so he can give Stiles, what is becoming a very familiar Highly Speculative Look.

“It was! I accidentally got some in my mouth when I was eating and spent the next eight hours tripping balls, convinced that I was really at Disneyland over in Anaheim with Miley Cyrus and Benjamin Franklin and all the oompa-loompas from the Gene Wilder version of Willy Wonka, and in the end I vomited until I passed out.”

“Why does that not surprise me at all?”

“Because you’re a bright-eyed optimist brimming with faith in my skills?”

Derek pulls the pillow from beneath his head and pushes it into Stiles’s face. Stiles cackles and bats him away and somehow ends up on top of Derek’s broad, strong body, looking down at him with their fingers still laced together. Derek’s green eyes with the gold halo around the iris peer up at him, amused. “How’s the view up there?”

Stiles glances around. “Not bad. Soon as we bounce back from this housing crisis, this is going to be prime real estate.”

“Glad you approve.” Derek’s hand comes up to play with the hair at the back of Stiles’s head. He’d been considering a haircut a few days ago, but if hands like those were going to be in his hair, then screw that. Stiles is also just this side of purring because yes, sexy but also just six different shades of cozy. He means to start kissing Derek, but he ends up putting his head on his shoulder instead with his nose pushed up under Derek’s jaw. When Derek unlaces their fingers and drapes both arms around him, it’s the most comfortable Stiles can remember being.

He doesn’t even realize he’s fallen back asleep until Scott is knocking on the door, calling them downstairs for spaghetti. Stiles hasn’t been this excited about a meal in a long time. So dinner should be awesome.

Should being the operative word. Scott actually makes a kick-ass sauce he learned from his mom and Allison is around to help mitigate any werewolf-on-werewolf dickishness that might occur. She’s a bro that way and possibly the nicest human being Stiles has ever met on planet earth. It’s almost repulsive how genuinely nice she is without trying, while simultaneously refusing to take shit from anyone. Stiles can be nice or take no bullshit, but he can’t do both things at once. He’s not some sort of circus monkey.

Also, she was the captain of their archery team in college and actually got tied for gold at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Oh yeah. His best friend married Katniss Everdeen. Stiles maintains that this makes him Haymitch but Scott won’t even see the freaking movies, let alone read the books.

Point is, all the key elements for a bitchin’ dinner party are there. There is awesome food, awesome roommates and awesome Derek, looking so good in one of Stiles’s faded Beacon Hills High Lacrosse T-shirts that Stiles is afraid he might literally die of hotness. Yet no. Everything is awful.

Scott is making a constant low-level growl. Derek is staring at Allison like she personally reached into his chest and pulled out his heart like the Wicked Queens on Once Upon a Time (which he knows all about because Lydia’s guilty pleasure; they Skype watched it together in college and no he’s not ashamed - much.) Allison looks ready to burst into tears; they’re all glittery on her lashes and her lower lip is trembling. All in all, Stiles has no clear idea of how they got here.

“I’m so sorry,” Allison whispers and it’s the second time she’s said that since introductions were made and the evening went to hell. “I didn’t- I was only eleven so I had no-“

“Stop,” Derek grits out. “Just stop. I don’t need your apologies.”

“You do though,” Allison says, reaching out to him across the small kitchen table. “We should all be apologizing to you, all the time. I didn’t know you were in the city.” He jerks back as soon has her fingertips land on his arm like her touch has burned him.

“Seriously,” Stiles demands, replacing her touch with his own. Derek’s muscles are corded so tight under his touch that Stiles can almost feel stress knots forming. “What the fuck is going on? You two know each other?”

“Not personally,” Derek says. His lips barely move as he speaks, which has to mean he's pissed. “Call it family connections.”

“It was years ago. My aunt Kate. And my dad,” Allison whispers. Before she can expand on what, exactly her aunt and father had to do with any of this, she blinks and goddamnit she’s crying. She’s crying and Scott has wolfed out because when someone makes his wife cry he can’t let that stand. Stiles gets that, but right now going all claws and fangs isn’t going to solve things.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” Scott snarls. He reaches out and wraps his hand around Allison’s upper arm. Her three quarter-length sleeves are light blue and it makes his fur and razor sharp claws stand out in sharp contrast.

“Our house, where my name is on the lease,” Stiles snaps. “And he’s not going anywhere. No one is going anywhere. We’re all going to calm the hell down and deal with this like the mature adults we’re all pretending to be.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Derek growls. It’s an actual growl, complete with animal noises and flashing blue eyes in opposition of Scott’s glowing gold. Now there’s another wolf at the table because why have one angry supernatural beast when you can have two?

“Oh my god,” Stiles cries, slumping back in his chair. “That is such a huge lie or you wouldn’t be on the verge of Hulking out and Allison wouldn’t be in tears.”

“I’m fine,” Allison says, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hands. She hates being seen as weak; it’s her thing, the way Stiles’ thing is being kept out of the loop on any given situation. “It’s fine.”

“Pants on fire,” he declares. “Both of you. I have a solution, okay? Just stop talking unless the two of you are ready to talk calmly with the group about what the hell is going on. Scott made Bolognese sauce and we’re wasting it.”

Scott frowns at that and it makes his nose twitch. It looks ridiculous in his wolf form. Stiles has to look down at his plate to keep from laughing because that would be the worst case of inappropriate giggles to ever happen to him, including that time he cracked up laughing during his grandpa’s funeral.

He stares determinedly at his plate and eats like it’s his mission in life to complete that serving of spaghetti. He’s halfway done when he finally looks up and finds the rest of the room leveled out in much the same way. Stiles wonders if this is what Jeremy Renner’s character in The Hurt Locker felt like _all_ the time, only a thousand times worse. He really hopes not, because defusing a potential explosion of this size was terrifying enough.

When Derek’s plate is empty, he pushes back from the table and walks to the sink without a word. There’s the sound of water running as he washes his flatware like a perfect guest before returning to the table. “I’ve got to get back,” he says, stilted and awkward, not the slippery cockslut from Hard Rick’s or the warm soft lover from Stiles’s bed. This is the closed, cold man who hides his vulnerability in academia and quiet anger — bitter that he can’t teach what he wants and that he has to deal with people at all rather than books. Three different people like the three swirls of the tattoo on his back. Stiles hates that he adores all of them, flawed as they are.

“I’ll walk you out.” He takes Derek’s hand because it’s their gesture, their deepest connection, and leads him out onto the stoop. He doesn’t let go when Derek makes his way down two steps. “Tell me you’ll be back.”

“I don’t know if I can come back here. The Argent woman- Stiles, you don’t know who she is.”

“She’s been one of my best friends for the last ten years. She’s good people.”

“She might be a good person but she’s not good people. Her people hunt us. Her people would hunt Scott.” He looks down at their hands and then away into the street. “Her people think that my people are rabid dogs that need to be put down and I can’t- I just can’t be around it. I don’t think I can come back to that. I’m sorry, Stiles.”

“Allison doesn’t think that. She’s knowingly married to a werewolf, dude. She’s going to have werewolf babies and be part of a werewolf family. Just because her family did some shitty things doesn’t mean you and I have to stop doing…whatever it is that we’re doing.”

Derek shrugs, shakes his head, then shrugs again. “I don’t know, Stiles. I just- I don’t know.”

“I have your number. You have mine. I’m going to text you.”

“I can’t stop you.”

“You could block my number. But don’t, okay? And answer. You should answer when I text you,” Stiles says, yet he thinks _And I’ll go to Hard Rick’s to make sure you don’t do anything too stupid._ He has a sinking suspicion that Derek is going to turn himself inside out after this. He doesn’t want to watch him - not when it will be a joyless encounter meant as a self-abusive purge — but Stiles knows that he’ll be there anyway. Derek is like gravity; Stiles is just a satellite in orbit now.

“We’ll see,” Derek concedes. He ducks his head. That’s not a no, so Stiles will take it.

“Can I kiss you goodbye?” Stiles asks. It might be pushing it, but he has to ask. This might be his last chance. This could be an end to their short courtship and he wants to get one last kiss in, with Derek a few inches below him on the stairs.

When Derek nods, Stiles cups his face in both hands and takes his mouth slow and warm, moaning a little when Derek opens easily for him, inviting Stiles’s tongue inside. Hands come to rest on his hips, anchoring him in place as they taste the sauce and underlying flavor of each other on lips and teeth until Derek pulls back, taking Stiles’s lower lip in his teeth with him for a moment before letting go.

Then he steps down off the front steps and onto the sidewalk. “I’ll see you around, Stiles,” Derek calls as he walks away. Stiles decides to take that as a promise.

~*~*~

Stiles has fallen down a Cracked.com information hole at work. It started with an article innocently named “Ten Cute Animals That Could Kill You”, and now he’s reading about the most recent apocalyptic near-misses in military history four hours later, dutifully ignoring everyone in the building. He blames Soren Bowie for this. There’s a conspiracy at work and as soon as he figures it out, he will write his own article and submit to Cracked himself. Fool-proof plan.

Yeah. Right. Because he has so much free time these days. He’ll just slip that project in there in between classes, studying, papers, this job, and hours of obsessing (obsessive having multiple meanings for both actual thought and masturbation sessions; the likes of which he hasn’t conducted since he was sixteen) over Derek Hale. Honestly, marveling over how close the world came to the brink of total annihilation is a relief from the Derek Spiral he’s been in for the last month. That’s its official title now. The Derek Spiral™ by Argent-McCall Creative LLCP. 

Since The Dinner of Doom, Stiles hasn’t seen Derek anywhere. He wasn’t even at Hard Rick’s on the weekends, which had Stiles good and worried. The second weekend he’d come in, one of the management had actually caught him by the arm and pulled him aside before he could hit the locker room.

“Where’s your friend?” The woman had asked. She was very possibly trans if her Michael Clark Duncan baritone was any indication, and her blue fingernails glowed in the low light as they dug into his arm hard enough to leave marks. “He’s never gone this long between visits,” she rumbled, tipping her head down towards him where she towered over him in some of the most impressive clear heels Stiles had ever seen in his life.

If he weren’t all about Derek, Stiles would have been having serious considerations about those dark, shapely legs because damn. But worry was a more powerful emotion than horny and he shook his head. “I was looking for him. He’s not here?”

“Not since the two of you came in together,” she had said and her fingernails dug in a little deeper and okay. Those were not acrylic. Acrylic would be softer and not possibly be drawing blood. “He always makes it at least once on the weekend, usually a day or two during the week too and now he’s missing. You want to tell me why?”

“I-I don’t know,” Stiles had stuttered, yanking his arm away. There were definite scratches. He needed bandaids and some Neosporin and maybe one of those watermelon lollipops his pediatrician used to give him, stat. “I came here looking for him too.”

“If you find him, tell him to at least give us a ring,” the woman had said. “We’re not the Ritz, but we keep an eye on regulars who are that regular.”

Stiles had nodded and wandered out, dazed. He’d texted Derek on his way home, just as he had every day since they last saw each other. Only this one has a picture of the pie tray at their diner through the window with the text caption **the pie misses u D:** attached. He was sitting on the bus when a text arrived in his inbox that said **im above bribery**. Stiles had let out a breath he felt like he’d been holding for days at the words. It wasn’t much, but it was more than he had before - enough to know that Derek was still out there and listening.

And since then, thats all it’s been. Stiles has flooded Derek’s inbox with inane texts and photos of things, like what he’s eating and the ridiculous hair/facial piercings/hipster clothing/oversized coffee/obnoxious lecture faces of everyone he comes across. He also makes a point to eat somewhere with pie for every meal and send Derek a picture with a frowning emoticon until he cracks. After a picture of the blueberry pie and the waiter’s flock of seagulls hair ( **seriously who has a Flock of Seagulls haircut anymore derek? this guy** ) the exchanges finally become mutual.

Yes, for every five to ten texts he gets one back from Derek, but that was about how their conversations had been balanced in person. It’s a step back to their middle ground if you ask Stiles. That most of Derek’s texts are complaining about how his students don’t appreciate the social-sexual implications of a woman writing about a man controlling birth as a horror concept in Frankenstein or how he has six students who didn’t turn in their South Asian Colonial Literature papers - six in a junior level class of twenty-five - is better than nothing. It’s something to talk about, something that keeps them tied together and Derek’s work-related complaints almost always lead Stiles into a seven text long response about the folklore he studied in undergrad and how it could relate. It’s working okay. Sure, all of it is just fueling the Derek Spiral™, but Stiles was okay with that.

The Cracked articles help too. Somehow he’s ended up on one about Teddy Roosevelt which is never a bad thing. He’s wondering if maybe Roosevelt wasn’t a secretly turned werewolf what with his willing asthma away with the power in his brain and singlehandedly leading the cavalry and everything. He digs out his phone and flips open a new text message to Derek. **Teddy the Bull Moose Roosevelt - werewolf? Y/N?**

Stiles hears a familiar voice say, “I’m supposed to have twenty-five copies of ‘ _Ali the Cairene and the Haunted House in Baghdad_ ’ on reserve. I talked to Molly?” Then there’s the sound of a phone vibrating and a electronic chirp as what must be Stiles’s text arrives at Derek’s phone.

He looks up and Derek is standing in front of him looking good enough to eat. His hair isn’t gelled, instead hanging in loose curls over his forehead. He’s in a white dress shirt with one button undone with an honest to God cardigan in a burnt burgundy over it and a crooked tie that probably started out the day done neatly but now is loosened and hangs around the third button of his shirt. With the small, silver, rectangle-framed glasses, Derek is unrecognizable. Stiles wants to eat him up with a spoon right where he stands.

“Uh, that’d be uh,” Stiles fumbles his laptop closed. “Teacher materials are held at the resource desk. I just do check outs and ins. And you know, late fees. Like if something’s gone for awhile and then it comes back, I handle that.”

Derek has the good grace to look sheepish at that. “Don’t get too drunk with power, Stiles,” Derek says, leaning awkwardly against the desk.

“I am Spider-Man mentored and certified. I know all about great responsibility.” Okay that sounds lame but he’s already said it so fuck it. Spider-Man is cool. “But I only have the power to call over to Molly. I don’t have your ghost thing.”

“That wouldn’t diminish my respect for you.”

Stiles laughs. “Oh my god, Derek what would?”

Derek ducks his head a little and his glasses slide down his nose. He fishes his phone out of his pocket then pushes his glasses up before meeting Stiles’s gaze again. “President Roosevelt, Stiles? Really?”

Stiles feels his whole face go pink because it looks like the mercury in Derek’s _Stiles Respect Barometer_ has just dropped. “Okay. That would, I guess.”

“Not by much. So, uh,” Derek rubs the back of his neck with his left hand, “When do you get off work?”

“At eight-thirty but I can probably get someone to cover for me and leave now.”

“No, it’s fine. I actually do have to pick up those papers at the resource desk for my class. I’ll pick you up in two hours then.”

“Pick me up?”

“Yeah,” Derek agrees and this time he’s the one to go a little pink. “I was thinking we could get dinner afterwards.”

“Get dinner,” Stiles repeats as Derek steps back from the desk. He shakes himself out of the glaze as Derek starts to walk away. “Wait. Actual dinner or go to the diner and watch you eat your weight in pie?”

“I’ll see you at eight-thirty,” Derek calls over his shoulder, making his way towards the resource desk.

Well okay. Stiles is officially going to be useless for the rest of the shift. He unlocks his phone and starts to call Scott because when in doubt bros before, well, guys he really likes because Derek is not a ho. Then he stops. Scott is not a big fan of Derek after the Dinner of Doom.

So, he goes on break and calls Lydia from outside on the library steps instead. He paces back and forth as the phone rings and rings. She picks up on the fifth one. Stiles blurts, “He wants to take me to dinner,” confident that Lydia will know exactly which he Stiles means. After all, he’s only been exchanging rambling emails and Facebook messages with her about Derek since that first night at Hard Rick’s.

“Time zones, Stiles. Time zones. It’s two-thirty in the morning. ”

“Oh sorry. But this is an emergency.”

Lydia groans. Stiles can hear her sheets moving as she rolls over. He wonders if the call woke up Jackson, who is probably in bed beside her over in London. He hopes so. The guy might make her happy, but he’s still a douche. “Getting asked out is an emergency.”

“By Derek. Yes. Yes it is. It’s code red, five alarm, the Doomsday Clock at 11:59 emergency.” Stiles is waving his hands in the air even know though he knows she can’t see it. “He just showed up at my work. Like magic he appeared suddenly nice and wanting to take me to dinner and I don’t know what to do. It’s been a month.”

“I thought that was what you wanted,” Lydia says, each word stretched out on a yawn.

“It was, but now that it’s happened I’m scared.”

“Oh my god. Don’t be such a pussy, Stiles. Either ask him what changed or embrace it and fuck your gift horse in the mouth.”

Stiles freezes mid-pace. “I don’t think that’s how that particular expression is supposed to go.”

“Two-thirty,” she grits out through teeth that Stiles can tell are clenched. “In the morning.

“Right. I forgot.” Stiles drops to sit on the step, his feet on the one below. “Lydia, I don't know what to do with this.”

“You don't know what to do with the guy you’ve been pining after, obnoxiously I might add, finally manning up and asking you out on a real date? Stiles, bonobos chimps can figure out what to do with that. It’s fairly simple.”

“That is a totally unfair comparison. Their entire social structure is built on sex. It’s easier for them.” Okay, that came out petulant, but he is not a sex chimp. His life is not that simple.

“Now you’re just being difficult.”

“This can't surprise you.”

“No, but it can annoy the crap out of me. Look, he’s making an effort. If you want to go forward then let the effort be worth something. Trust me on this one.”  
Stiles does trust her. She and Jackson have spent most of their relationship swinging back and forth between starry-eyed romance and feral fights. If anyone knows how to handle the bounce back after a communications breakdown, it’s Lydia.

“What if it doesn’t work though?”

“Then he isn’t the right one and you’ll try again. We both know that most of the time this love stuff is a numbers game.”

“You just happened to find your number in high school.”

“Well, I’m a math genius.” She yawns again. This one is so big he can hear her jaw pop. Stiles winces as she continues. “Just assume it will go well until it doesn’t.”

“That blew up in my face with introducing him to Scott and Allison.”

“But you said in your email that before that it was the best you’ve ever had. So let it be good again. I’m going now, Stiles. Some of us have real jobs.”

“Yeah, but what if-“ The beep of her hanging up cuts off his sentence. Awesome. Just awesome. That is perfectly reasonable advice that he is in no position to take. Damnit. He pockets his phone and goes back to the library.

He expects the rest of his shift to drag but instead it’s gone in a flash and suddenly Derek is standing in front of him. His glasses have slid down his nose and he has a blue plastic folder curled into a tube he holds in his left hand. He taps the folder against his leg and glances anywhere but Stiles’s face as he ask, “So, you ready to go?”

“Yeah. Just let me clock out.” He shoots an IM to the supervisor on duty, then logs out of the university system on the library’s already-out-of-date desktop computer and he’s off duty before he can get his books and laptop packed away. Ah, technology; it’s a wonder and a marvel.

They don’t talk as they walk together, off campus and into downtown. Stiles is dying to ask but he bites his tongue. Derek hasn’t stopped beating his leg with that folder the entire walk, which is a clear sign that if anything, Derek is more nervous about this than Stiles. They end up at a place that does ridiculously gourmet burgers and makes fries from every kind of potato on the planet and an additional seven kinds of vegetables. Stiles has walked by it a few times and been more than tempted but always figured that he could just get a cheap burger and fries for five bucks and move on with his life. Derek insists that he pick pretty much everything he wants from the menu. Having seen Derek eat enough times to know what he’s dealing with, Stiles doesn’t hesitate. He does surprise Stiles when he orders everything to go, then leads them another block or so down the street to the entrance to one of the city’s many small monuments. This one is a six foot high obelisk with the date of some accomplishment surrounded on all four sides with stone benches. This late in the evening, they’re empty and poorly lit by the street lamps casting their light in the opposite direction.

Stiles has decimated his fries when Derek finally sets down his half-eaten burger and speaks. Its enough to make him spit take.

Derek is staring straight at the little statue; from here Stiles can see it’s to commemorate the groundbreaking of the area as a town center two hundred plus years ago. “Nine members of my family were burned alive in a house fire when I was sixteen. My uncle was so badly burned that he ended up a vegetable in long-term care for half a decade.”

“Oh my god,” Stiles chokes, a piece of curly fry hanging from his lower lip. He spits it onto the ground. “Oh my god. _Hale_.” His brain is buzzing as information batters his mind like blows. “You’re Derek Hale. You’re from Beacon Hills, too.”

Derek takes off his glasses and puts them in the pocket of the cardigan. He turns to look at Stiles with his beautiful, strange eyes. He doesn’t nod, but he doesn’t need to.

“Derek, I- God, I remember when that fire happened. My dad’s still the sheriff there. He investigated it; he said it was arson.”

“Yeah. It was. Six years later, when my uncle came out of his catatonia, he killed a dozen people involved in the arson including Allison’s aunt Kate, who set the fire and-” He breaks off and casts his gaze down at his hands. He swallows so hard that Stiles can hear it. “And my older sister Laura who went to see him when the facility called to tell us he’d regained some consciousness. She was one of the only two other surviving members of my family.”

Stiles drops his fries to the ground and reaches out to take Derek’s hand closest to his. He laces their fingers together, a move that feels so familiar to him. The reality is that they’ve only done this a handful of times, connected like this, and the last time was over a month ago. Now it looks almost alien to see his pale long fingers laced with Derek’s darker, hairier ones.

What matters is that neither of them lets go. Derek is allowing Stiles to comfort him in this small way and right now that’s everything. So Stiles doesn’t say anything because holy shit, what do you say to that anyway? This is better, willing his affection through their joined palms.

“My little sister Cora was still in school. Laura was my Alpha, my leader.” Derek’s free hand flexes open then closed like he wants something, anything to hold onto. He has nothing now and Stiles suspects he had nothing then either. “So, when she ordered me to stay with Cora, I had to stay. Even when she stopped answering her phone, I couldn’t go. She was my Alpha; I obeyed like I was raised to, but I should have gone with her. I could’ve done something, saved her.” He shakes his head. “Even though your father called me and told me they found Laura’s body, I thought they were wrong until Cora woke up screaming with the transfer of Alpha power through a death in the family line.”

“Derek,” Stiles breathes, but Derek doesn't let him get any further than that.

“I didn’t realize you were the same Stilinski as the Sheriff until I saw Allison, smelled her. She doesn’t smell exactly like Kate but blood smells like blood. It’s enough to put it together.”

Stiles is putting things together himself. Six years after the Hale fire is exactly the right time to match when Scott got bitten. It lines up with the rash of murders Scott dream-visioned and the sudden halt to it. The whole thing is too neat to be a coincidence. That Derek’s murdering psycho uncle who was mutilated by Allison’s aunt is the wolf who turned Scott is a kind of symmetry that makes Stiles want to barf.

That realization is better than the look of utter despair on Derek’s face. Seeing that makes Stiles want to cry.

“There’s only the two of us left now,” Derek says so low Stiles has to strain to hear it. “Everyone else is dead.”

“There’s only two Stilinskis left, too,” Stiles says and Derek looks up sharply. For a second, Stiles thinks he’s going to pull away, think that Stiles was trying to compare his individual to the massive Hale tragedy. Derek blinks a few times then dips his head to rest his temple against Stiles’s shoulder with a soft exhale that sounds more exhausted than Stiles has ever felt in his entire life.

Stiles lifts the hand he’s holding and presses his mouth to the skin of Derek’s hand just below his knuckles. He can think of a million things he could say but not a single one of them is something he would’ve wanted to hear if he were talking about his mom. He rubs his nose between the bones of Derek’s fingers instead, a silent _I’m here, I hear you, I’m staying, I care_ instead. The way Derek’s whole body loosens against his seems to indicate that he did the right thing.

“Chris Argent killed my uncle Peter where Kate didn’t. Victoria’s been showing up to harass my sister every year, three or four times a year, since the Alpha power passed to her. Cora was sixteen when it started. Sixteen and Victoria would show up in our apartment, or outside her classes or at her work - when she least expected it - with a knife covered in poison or a loaded gun, just to check in and see if the scraps of the Hale pack are still obeying their fucking Code.” He shakes his head but doesn’t look up. “The last time Victoria ambushed Cora was a couple days before I met you and I couldn’t- I’m not- It’s all my fault. All of it.”

“What the fuck?” Stiles blurts. He feels like somewhere in he must have passed out and missed, like, a huge part of the conversation. He had to have. “Why are you talking like a crazy person all of a sudden?” He demands because he’s lost the thread completely.

Derek tries to jerk away but Stiles doesn’t unlace his fingers so it jerks his shoulder. The werewolf strength isn’t enough to pull his arm out of the socket or anything but they both realize the mistake when Stiles releases Derek’s hand with a gasped “Ow fuck. Fucking motherfucking shit ow.”

“Stiles, are you okay?”

“Yeah I’m fine.”

“I forgot. God, I had a second where I didn’t think about how you’re not…”

Stiles rubs his shoulder and looks at Derek who is now standing in the small park space. He’s closer to the monument than to Stiles. “Not what?”

“Like me.” Derek wraps his arms around himself around himself and takes another step back. “You can’t understand, all right?”

“Bullshit.” Stiles snaps.

“Stiles.”

“It is. Or I can at least try if you let me. How did we even get from Allison’s mom going all Winchester-y on your sister to you blaming yourself for the horrible things that other people did to your family. It doesn’t make sense, especially not with you all the way over there.”

He holds out his hand, palm up in invitation. Derek wraps his arms tighter around himself. He stares at Stiles’s hand like it might bite him. Considering the little shoulder clusterfuck, it was a valid concern, Stiles would give him that.

However, Stiles is not easily dissuaded. “Look, just come back over here. I’m fine. You’re far away and it was easier to talk with you next to me.”

Derek’s thumbs are wearing a worried pattern over his biceps. “I keep hurting people I try to care for,” he says. His eyes are haunted and it’s not just the streetlights glow making him look that way. “That’s why I left New York. She’s better off without me and I thought if I came out here, if I got as far away as possible, the only person I’d hurt would be me. Once Cora was in the dorms at college and the local pack accepted her, I thought I’d gotten it to end. ” He looks upwards and blinks a few times before he says, “But I guess it’ll never end.”

“This?” Stiles waves at his shoulder and makes a rude noise “Please. This doesn’t count. Derek, my dad did worse when I was nine and he backed his police cruiser over my foot.” He gets to his feet and steps forward with both hands stretched out in front of him in a placating gesture. The shoulder Derek had pulled on only aches a little. Lacrosse practices with Finstock had caused more pain than this.

Derek shakes his head, breaking his gaze down from the starless sky to the brick beneath their feet. He doesn’t pause to look at Stiles. “That’s different.”

“It is not.” He stops three inches away from Derek and brings his hand to hover just above his elbows and twitching fingers. “An accident with something powerful is still just an accident. My dad wasn’t paying attention to the car, you weren’t paying attention to your strength. Neither of you tried to hurt anyone so yeah, it’s just the same. It’s just an accident. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No. No, I let her fuck me until she owned me and then I brought her into our home,” Derek hisses through clenched teeth, his eyes still locked on the ground. Stiles hears more than sees his claws emerge as they rip through the fabric of his cardigan. “I let her make me come-stupid and convince me that was love. After that, it was nothing to just waltz her inside for the grand fucking tour. I showed Kate all the best ways to burn them to death. There were children in there, my parents.”

Blood drips to the ground where it’s seeped through the fabric. Stiles wants to grab his hands. Wants to rip those razor sharp nails out of Derek’s skin and press his hands against the now-soaked fabric until the werewolf-healing kicked in and his wounds closed. He’s more afraid Derek will hurt himself worse if he tries that though, so when he reaches out to touch Derek, he goes for the back of his neck instead of his claws.

Both Stiles’s hands meet when he cups them around Derek’s nape. Stiles moves in those last three inches just as Derek starts to wince away, and presses his forehead against Derek’s. All Derek would need to do would be to duck under his embrace to get out. Stiles’s fingers are laced together but they’re holding each other, not Derek. Derek goes tense, then shudders violently before sagging into Stiles.

This is totally going to leave blood on his shirt which will horrify him later. He will set this shirt on fire because he cannot deal with blood. It’s a thing he has. Right now, though, Stiles could not give a shit.

“Stop it,” he whispers. “Stop it. Don’t do this to yourself. Derek, fucking stop it.”

“I can’t,” Derek chokes out.

Stiles nods as best he can with their faces pressed together this way. This is Derek doing the best he can. This is where Derek vanished to for a month. Stiles wonders if Allison knows, if Scott does, if Derek has ever spoken about this out loud before. Stiles decides the first two questions don’t matter as much as the third to which the answer is almost certainly “no”.

“Okay. That’s fine. Could you please maybe pull your claws out of yourself though?” Stiles asks, surprised to find that he’s crying. He hasn’t cried since before he started high school, back when he was still getting panic attacks over losing his mom. He is now though, he hears it in his own voice before he feels the wetness on his face. “I have a problem with blood when you’re about to cut off your own arms.”

“I’m not cutting off my own arms.”

“You are.”

Derek unfolds his arms, thank fuck, and wipes his hands on his jeans. He lifts his hand and pets Stiles’s face with the clean backs of his fingers. “I am not.”

“You stopped just to prove me wrong.” Stiles laughs. If it makes him cry a little harder, there’s not much he can do about it.

“Of course.” Derek’s knuckle brushes across his left cheek.

Stiles tightens his hold on Derek’s neck just a little in response. He’s got super strength. He can take the pressure.

The gesture has the bonus effect of making Derek lean forward so that he can rub his clean-shaven cheek against Stiles’s wet one. The gesture is vaguely puppyish, sweet and openly affectionate in contrast to his chiding “That’s exactly why. You’ve figured me out. My sole motivation is to contradict you. Way to go, Sherlock.”

“I was beginning to suspect as much.” Stiles says, feeling far less shaky than he had before.Then he chuckles because Derek is still Derek and after everything, all the pieces still fit together to form one of the most complicated and enticing pictures Stiles has ever seen.

“What?”

“I bet you have an entire thesis on sexuality and the supernatural in the Sherlock Holmes series, don’t you?”

Derek huffs and pulls back. Stiles can sees that his eyes are definitely red too even if they’re dry. “It’s not a thesis.”

Stiles kisses him with the knowledge that this is the first time he’s ever kissed someone he’s been in love with. It’s remarkably similar to kissing anyone else, open mouths and shared breath, but this one he feels through his whole body like a lightning strike dividing a tree. It’s not easy or simple or even good. What it is, is his, unequivocally, even if Derek doesn’t love him back now, doesn’t ever heal enough to love him back. This moment and this feeling is Stiles’s. Nothing he can imagine would make him give it up.

Derek is breathless when they part so maybe he felt something too. Maybe, because he runs his hand down Stiles’s back and nuzzles his jaw when they break apart.

Stiles leans into the contact as he tugs at the buttons of Derek’s cardigan. The blood soaked fabric is making his skin crawl and he needs to see unbroken skin, feel it beneath his hands.

Derek lets him pull it off and crumples it into a ball he can hold in one fist. He strokes the other hand from Derek’s elbow to his wrist, once then back down to hold his wrist just like he did that first morning. There’s a little tacky blood but Derek’s arm is otherwise unmarred.

Stiles lets out a sigh of relief. Derek kisses him again. It’s warm, wet and distracting because Stiles doesn’t realize Derek’s twisted his wrist so they’re holding hands again until they stop for air. He licks at Stiles’s lips then says “Come home with me.” Stiles nods because he can’t imagine saying anything but yes.  
~*~*~

Derek’s apartment is littered with books. Not just textbooks and classics but paperbacks and graphic novels and even single issue comic books. They form a minefield that Derek mumbles an apology for, but charms Stiles right up until he plants a foot on an issue of the all women X-men on Derek’s bedroom floor and slides about six inches. He nearly keels over but Derek catches him around the waist, knocking the wind out of him.

“Keen werewolf reflexes,” Stiles gasps as he gets his breath back.

“Yeah,” Derek replies, loosening his hold so Stiles can turn to face him in the embrace and wow. Now Stiles feels like Scarlett O’Hara before the war. Derek is at least as good looking as Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler. No, Derek is definitely better looking than Clark Gable and a solid tie against Vivian Leigh.

“Handy.”

“Yeah.” Derek repeats.

He moves to hold Stiles by the shoulders. Stiles curses his long sleeve t-shirt and layer of blue plaid flannel over it. He can’t even feel the heat of Derek’s hands through it, just gentle pressure as he runs his hands up and down Stiles’s arms in a gesture that seems as nervous as it does a caress.

His eyes dart around as if realizing for the first time that his bed is the only empty space in the room. “Sorry. I’m mostly here to sleep and uh-”

Stiles grins. “Read?”

Derek looks down at his hands. They stop at Stiles’s elbows and squeeze just a little tighter. “I didn’t think this through.”

“Pretty sure you’ve filled your thinking quota over the last month,” Stiles assures him, imagining how much of the last several weeks Derek must have spent thinking about what he told Stiles tonight. “You’re due some time off introspecting to focus on verbing instead. Or, wait, that came out wrong. You’re the English professor. You know what I mean right?”

“Yeah,” Derek says a third time but this time it comes out a rumbling growl and eyes flash electric blue in the yellow light of the overhead light. Half a second later Stiles is being kissed. It’s nothing like their other kisses, all wet warmth and bright feeling that vibrates between them. This burns like a forest fire, white hot and moving with a speed that’s out of control. Stiles’s hands bury into Derek’s thick hair as he groans into the kiss.

Stiles’s shirts are gone, just gone. There was fabric on his skin one second and cool air the next. Not that he’s complaining but damn. There were definitely claws involved.

Derek’s hands land huge and warm on his hips. Stiles is riding against Derek’s hard cock and harder muscled thigh with one pull of Derek’s arms. Stiles moans into their kiss which Derek takes as the go sign for backing them onto his bed. Stiles goes down as soon as his knees hit the mattress.

The only reason he doesn’t take Derek with him is so that he can have his hands free to work on his fly while watching Derek get out of his shirt and jeans. Stiles thinks it’s a small miracle that they both manage to get all the way down to underwear before they’re on each other again. He’s never going to be able to find his socks when this is over, of course, but it’s a price he’s willing to pay.

Derek slides over him like a wave, grinding down with his hips and arching his back before ducking down for a kiss. Stiles drags his hands from the square space at the small of Derek’s back up to where he knows the tattoo rests between sharp shoulder blades.

Derek curls up into the touch like a cat being petted and breaks the kiss to mouth at Stiles’s neck. He nips at Stiles’s throat with his blunt incisors, breathing “Tell me what you want,” into the bite. “My mouth? My hands? My ass? Stiles, what do you want? I don’t know which way you want to fuck me if you don’t tell me how.”

Words. What are words? He talks all the time, he’s going to law school to learn how to argue for a living, but now, when he needs them most he can’t find words. All he can do is groan Derek’s name and dig into his back with his fingernails. That seems to be answer enough because Derek is rearing up and pulling Stiles’s boxers down his hips and off, which okay, could mean anything but that’s fine by him. Derek can totally drive on this trip Sexy Town.

He’s startled when Derek pulls lube from thin air, or more likely under the bed, and strokes Stiles’s cock with it. Stiles’s air has gone away with his words at the sight and the feel and all he can muster is a choked out “Condom?” when Derek straddles his hips, making it clear that this isn’t going to end in a slippery handjob.

Derek shakes his head. “I haven’t been back to Hard Rick’s since the last time I saw you and my kind can’t get sick or carry diseases.” He leans forward and kitten licks at the underside of Stiles’s chin until he reaches the junction of jaw and neck where he punctuates the point with a dull but firm bite. “If you fuck me bare, I'll be able feel your heart beating and then I'll be all wet and hot when you come.”

“Okay,” Stiles gasps. “Okay then.” His fingers tighten and release on the backs of Derek’s shoulders until he sits up and then they drop to his waist. He doesn’t have Lebron James’s huge hands or anything but they curve solid and strong around Derek’s hips and he can see the skin flush red where his fingers dig in as Derek sinks onto his cock. Once his ass is resting in the cradle of Stiles’s pelvic bones, Stiles tries again but all that comes out is another oh so articulate “Okay. Yeah, okay.”

Derek heaves a sigh that Stiles can actually feel around him. He’s hot inside, just barely wet enough unlike the one time Stiles was inside him before with his fingers, but so much tighter. The clench and hold of Derek’s body is pulling what little air he has left out of his lungs.

“Oh my god, Derek you’re so amazing. How are you even fucking real?” He reaches up, trying to cup his face but on his back with Derek sitting with his back arched and his hands planted behind him to form a 130° angle with their bodies, it’s too far. He can barely brush Derek’s nipple as Derek grinds his hips in lazy circles, driving Stiles slowly insane.

Derek catches his hand and bends over to suck the digits between his lips which makes Stiles groan at the sight. Derek, on the other hand, lets out a vibrating sound at the change of angle which is kind of weird since he’s not sure if real wolves purr like house cats. Then again scientists don’t actually know why cats purr to begin with. Anyway, why is he thinking about cats or actual dog-wolves when he has a beautiful human-shaped werewolf who has gone from the lazy hoola-hoop move to riding his cock like Stiles is a bucking bronco and Derek wants to get first place at the sex rodeo? 

He tongue-fucks Derek’s mouth in time to the steady up and down rhythm Derek’s built. Stiles wonder if his thighs are burning like Stiles’s are from pushing up to meet him with every downward thrust. He hopes Derek can feel this everywhere, that it’s stealing him of oxygen and focus like it is for Stiles. In case it’s not, he lets go of Derek’s hip to wrap his hand around Derek’s cock, hard and already a little slick with precome.

“You feel, oh my god, Derek, all of you feels so good. Let me-“ he breaks off mid-sentence to pull himself up into a sitting position so Derek is seated in his lap. Stiles likes its better this way. He can pull his fingers out of Derek’s mouth and replace them with his tongue. Derek more inhales him than returns the kiss. Stiles feels like he’s falling into his mouth just like he’s falling into Derek’s body.

In this position there’s no stretch to use the wet digits to reach behind Derek to gently prod his rim. Derek makes a high noise like a whimper as Stiles toys with the tight skin where Stiles’s cock is spreading him open, moving inside. The contact makes Derek shudder harder as Stiles does his best to line up the drag of his fingertips in time with the strokes of his fist on Derek’s cock.

Derek’s breath catches and fragments, throwing them out of the kiss, leaving them both gasping and dazed. Derek shudders again. His eyes actually roll back in his head with pleasure, but Stiles realizes that Derek is going soft in his hand at the same time. His breathing hasn’t changed, neither has his expression - his eyes bliss-glazed, mouth open making little noises of pleasure - but there’s a little tick in a muscle beneath his jaw that slaps Stiles out of his sex-haze.

Seeing that makes him remove his hands from Derek’s hole and cock to plant them safely on Derek’s shoulders instead. Derek slows at the change in contact only to stop completely as Stiles gently presses on his broad shoulders. It leaves them in the hyper-intimate position of sitting face to face, with Stiles still inside him, eye to eye if Derek were willing to look which all of a sudden he absolutely won’t do.

Derek refusing to meet his gaze strikes Stiles with the fact that this - being in bed with Derek, fucking him, being the sole focus of his attention - is what he’s been waiting for. This is what he’s been chasing since the moment he saw Derek’s face for the first time through the fence of naked bodies that surrounded him. He didn’t use the sort of cold calculation or researched planning he usually employs when pursuing something he wants but that doesn’t change the motive or result. He wanted Derek and he was relentless and now they’re here. In the immortal philosophy of Faith the vampire slayer - want, take, have.

He feels a little guilty. Okay, he feels a lot guilty because Derek bared his fucking soul and now they’re going to _just_ fuck? 

This feels wrong. Off-balance. Stiles has too much power, armored while Derek is exposed. Worse, he’s far too comfortable with the upper hand. He likes it too much this way. That ruins it for him almost as much as Derek going soft in his hand.

Derek bends his neck to head-butt Stiles’s shoulder. “Don’t stop,” he half whines, half groans. The sound is ripped from his core. It should be Stilinski kryptonite.

It would be if Stiles couldn’t see the manic desperation in Derek’s eyes that he thought was desire. If Derek were hard between their stomachs it might work on him but he’s not. Stiles feels like scum and it’s the least sexy thing ever.

Derek rocks his hips and bites Stiles’s shoulder hard enough to hurt. “What are you doing? I said don’t fucking stop.”

Stiles can’t keep going even if he wanted to. The lust is fading, leaving him with a dick that’s deflating and an ache in his chest that he’s only ever felt for his friends or his dad. This ache is different though, a thousand times sharper, like a knife twisting through his chest to his heart.

He wonders if this feeling is part of being in love too. If it is, then it fucking sucks.

He tries to stall by rubbing his thumbs over the corded muscle in Derek’s shoulders yet all that does is remind Stiles how tense Derek is, how high strung they both are. “I don’t think we’re doing this right.”

Derek gives him a look that’s mostly derision delivered with an extra large helping of annoyance. “It’s sex. You’re inside me. I was fucking myself on your cock. Tab A in Slot B. We were doing it fine.”

“No, I just meant-“

“Look, if you don’t want to do this then you should just get the hell out. If you want to stay,” Derek clenches all of his internal muscles at once and oh my god Stiles doesn’t think that’s fair. That’s not fair at all. “You should stay and finish fucking me.”

Stiles grits his teeth and pushes Derek backwards onto the bed. Derek goes easy, humming in pleasure at the new position. Except once Stiles isn’t weighed down by over two hundred pounds of fuck-hungry werewolf, he pulls out and rolls off him.

It is one of the top five most difficult things he has ever done in his life. Losing his mom and helping Scott figure out how to be a non-murder-happy werewolf were tougher but this is definitely top five material.

It’s made worse by the way Derek is looking at him. His expressions are snapshots of betrayed offense and disappointment coated in a thick layer of self-doubt and self-loathing. All of which would be invisible if Stiles hadn’t learned how to look through the glossy sexual glamour of Derek’s protective shell.

He shifts onto his side and stretches out next to Derek, planting a hand on his chest so he won’t bolt. Well, so Derek will be encouraged not to at least. He can’t force Derek to do anything without weaponized plant extracts.

He has to the hope that petting up and down Derek’s sternum will be enough. “We need to talk about this.”

Derek makes a disgusted noise and rolls onto his back. His stomach is wet with precome and lube and he toys with the mess, idly dragging his fingertips through it. “I’m done talking. That’s the point.”

“No. No, that’s not the point. Derek, you’re not hard.”

Derek shrugs and keeps his gaze resolutely fixed on his low ceiling. “It happens to everyone at some point, doesn’t it? You’re making a big deal out of nothing.”

“You told me about your whole family being murdered and then we came up here and fucked. I just- I think I should’ve known better.”

“There isn’t a better to know. This,” Derek waves a hand down in the general direction of their junk, “is what I want.”

“Okay, but maybe it’s not what I want. Maybe I want to, I don’t know, talk to you.”

“Talk to me.”

“Yeah. About stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Yeah. Like, the stuff we talked about during dinner. It made me want to talk more to you not just go in for a blind screw, you know? I thought maybe I could tell you about my mom and how I had to watch her lose her mind before she died and that you’d- you’d understand because you lost yours too. Or what you’ve been doing for the last month, because you weren’t around so I don’t know, I, uh, I missed you. But if you’re dead set on sex we can talk about why you can stay rock hard when dozens of faceless strangers use you like a blowup doll but just now, with me, it was like you were forcing it, forcing us, to happen because you thought we should. Not because you wanted to, as your dick felt free to share with the class.”

“Jesus Christ, Stiles.”

“Like I said. Stuff.”

“Stuff.” Derek snaps, pushing up on an elbow to glare at him. “What do you want from me, Stiles? I gave you more than I’ve ever given anyone. Why the fuck isn’t that enough?”

“It is enough,” Stiles says, reaching out to rest his arm on Derek’s bicep. “If you want it to be the end of the talking for now, it can be. Just, the kind of sex we were having felt wrong for all this, us.” He gave Derek’s arm a gentle squeeze. “I felt like I was using you.”

Derek doesn’t meet his eyes. “Doesn’t bother me.”

“I get that but it bothers me that I did that and it bothers me that it doesn’t bother you.”

“So what? You expect this, whatever, to run on Stiles sex-morality?”

“Whatever,” Stiles repeats. “Relationship, Derek. We’re in a relationship. There are feelings and kissing. That’s a relationship.”

Derek’s scowl deepens. “Maybe I don’t want to call this a relationship.”

“Dude, you’re an English teacher. We fit at least one of the dictionary definitions.”

“Stiles.”

“Derek.”

Derek’s teeth worry his lower lip. “The last time I had a thing that fit that dictionary definition it was with her.”

“I’m not her.” His fingernails dig into Derek’s skin in anger at the comparison. “I won’t be her. I could never be her.” Derek doesn’t even blink and Stiles sits up and scoots away, his skin crawling. “She’s a goddamn monster and fuck you for fucking saying that to me, you fucking prick.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Inferred. Whatever. You’re still a prick.”

Black eyebrows and a twitching jaw pull together to say without words exactly what the fuck Stiles should have been expecting, and okay. He has a point. Derek had been a jerk from the word go. Somewhere between that first conversation in the shower at Hard Rick's and being here in Derek’s bed, Stiles managed to forget the part where Derek could and would be a complete asshole when he wanted to be.

“You know what? Screw it. It's fine.”

“Fine.” Derek echoes. Quiet stretches between them for a moment before he asks, “So, are you pissed off enough for angry sex?”

Sprawled out and naked, Derek is so blatantly soft that it’s practically an anatomical example worthy of a text book. Stiles gapes at him. “Are you shitting me right now?”

“No.”

“You really expect me to fuck you now?”

“Well yeah. Angry sex. According to everything I have ever read that mentioned the subject, its supposed to be both cathartic and incendiary, so... You’re pissed, I’m still wet and open. Let’s go.”

Stiles flails so hard in the direction of Derek’s crotch he nearly falls off the bed. He doesn’t because he is graceful as a gazelle, okay? A gazelle. But it’s a close shave.

“You aren’t turned on!” He declares because he is a man and men do not shriek. Witches shriek; hags who live in the woods and brew foul concoctions and give Caesar warnings about the Ides of March shriek - not Stiles Stilinski. “I am not into sex with not turned-on people. It’s gross. And rapey. And just... Is this you trying get me to hurt you or something, Derek? Because no. I’m never going to be that angry, ever.”

Derek’s full lips turn into a frown. “You are reading way too far into this.”

“And for someone whose job is subtext you aren't reading far enough. Derek. You don’t want me. Why are-?” He flails again. Then he drops them to the bed and his brow furrows. He picks his hands up again to accompany his words. “If you don’t want me that’s okay because we can be just friends, but I don't want you to force it with me. Please, okay?”

Derek cocks his head to the side. It’s such a confused labrador move that Stiles would make the obvious dog joke and laugh his ass off if he weren’t so pissed off and bummed out.

“Stiles, I let you fuck me. In my apartment. In my bed. I’ve never let anyone do that. When did I say I don’t want you?”

“Your dick did said it. He’s saying it right now.” He waves at Derek’s softie. “Hi. I know you don’t like me but if you come back I’ll be super friendly!” Nothing happens. Derek’s cock doesn’t even twitch. Stiles lifts his eyes to meet miraculous green ones. “See? Not interested.”

Derek heaves an annoyed sigh and rolls his eyes. Stiles imagines he learned that move from the little sister he mentioned earlier. “Oh, that.”

Okay. What? “Yes, Derek. Oh. That.”

“I just don’t get hard or stay hard you know, and, I don’t come with people, like at the club. They’re variations on a theme.”

“A theme. Your penis has a theme.”

“Yeah.”

“If your genitals have themes, it's a sign that you really need friends who aren’t lit majors or professors.”

Derek says nothing to that and Stiles realizes, belatedly, that maybe Derek doesn’t have that many friends. Or any friends. Shit. “So, the failure to hoist the flag doesn’t mean the boat’s not sailing?”

“Okay, first, awful metaphor and second, yeah. Basically.”

Stiles flops onto his back and reaches towards Derek’s face. He traces over Derek’s eyebrows with his fingertips. Derek pushes into the touch making Stiles’s breath catch. This kind of intimacy makes him feel like he’s drowning and brings him from spaghetti limp to rock-hard in a second because apparently he’s a whore for feelings. “That, uh, that sucks.”

“It’s my issue,” Derek says, pushing his face up and turning his head to the side so that he can kiss his palm. “I like getting fucked. I like it even when my cock's not hard. I like it all the time.You know that, Stiles. You’ve seen me take it.”

God has he ever. “Yeah.”

“Only here with you was different but you stopped before I could form an opinion on this,” Derek makes a sweeping gesture encompassing the room, the bed, and the two of them. “So if you’re worried about want, then I suggest you getting the fuck over yourself because what I want is for you to get your cock back inside me so I can decide what I think about this whole…whatever.”

Stiles can't help the smile that cracks his face in half. “Relationship.”

Derek shrugs. “Like I said, whatever.”

“Admit that we’re dating and I will fuck you right this second.”

Derek grimaces. “That’s blackmail.”

“This is an exchange of goods and/or services to the betterment of both parties. This is fucking capitalism at work.”

“You are going to be a very scary lawyer, Stiles.”

Stiles wiggles his eyebrows. He’s going for full Austin Powers. “Does my habeus corpus get you horny?”

“I - what the hell does that even mean?”

“Well you know, the piece of legal paper but the direct translation is _may you have the body_ so seriously, does my habeus corpeus rev your engine, light your fire, make your wet, eager hole ache for my-“

“Stiles,” Derek chokes out, slamming his hand over Stiles’s mouth. Stiles licks his palm. He may use that spit later. Stiles has no way to know but why not share? He lets out a muffled interrogative and Derek grits his teeth. “Ignoring how wrong the grammar of ‘my may you have the body’ is, yes okay? Yes we’re dating and yes it makes me hot so just, shut the fuck up and fuck me.”

Throwing up victory arms while Derek is holding his hand over Stiles’s mouth is difficult but he manages. Stiles is highly motivated and extremely good at adapting to difficult situations(see his entire friendship with Scott since he was bitten their sophomore year of high school). Derek rolls his eyes but that just means he’s laughing on the inside and when Stiles licks his palm again, he gets the hint and drops it to rest clammy and warm on Stiles’s hip.

“This is awesome and you kick ass but we’re having a safeword this time.”

“Are you going to tie me up?”

“No. Still. It seems like a good plan, you know, to opt out without us thinking we’re not dating anymore. Because we are dating and we’re going to fuck in just a second because that is what couples who are dating do. I just want to be safe.”

Derek raises an eyebrow. “Right.”

“Mine’s going to be pineapple. What about you?”

“Incunabula.”

Stiles stares.“That is not a word.”

“Mm, it is.”

“No it's not.”

“Is,” Derek persists, his hand moving across Stiles stomach before heading south. “It’s anything printed before the 1500s. I have two from 1480s Germany in temperature controlled safe deposit boxes.” He says, sliding his hand down Stiles’s thigh, deftly avoiding his dick but moving with clear intent.

“You are so weird.”

“They are priceless relics.” Derek pinches his inner thigh. 

Stiles is sure it’s a soft pinch for a werewolf. Even so he hisses and moves back. 

“Okay, okay. Look, I’m not really-“ He’s about to say something. Ready? Hard? He doesn’t know for sure because his cock is hitting the back of Derek’s throat all of a sudden and his way with words has vanished again.

Derek looks up at him and with his green-blue-seriously-what-color-is-that eyes and they’re calm now, like still water lapping on the shore of an exotic island in some country Stiles will never visit. He’s drowning in their depths and the pleasure of Derek’s clever tongue and rhythmic swallowing. Derek pulls off of him mere minutes later, sloppy and noisy with lines of spit connecting his lush lips to his cock too soon.

Stiles makes an incoherent noise and grabs at Derek’s hair, tugging, because why is he stopping? Stopping is bad. His mouth is magic and it should never ever stop. He could just suck Stiles’s dick forever and ever, amen. And maybe Stiles pulls Derek’s hair a little harder than he would with anyone else he’s ever been with because Derek can take it and also because he wants to trust Derek to say no after everything they’ve just discussed.

A sharp thrill shoots through Stiles when Derek bats his hands away gently. It’s not verbal but it’s a limit, a direction to point Stiles in that keeps them together in this rather than leaving Stiles to take everything with the freedom to be greedy. He leans over and kisses Derek on the mouth, open but quick - tasting himself for a moment before he pulls away and breathes “Thank you.”

“I like doing it,” Derek preens, smirking.

Stiles doesn’t bother to correct him. They’ve moved forward about a million miles today. He’s not going to force him to face more right now, not when he’s fuck-hungry and clearly pleased with himself. Okay, to be fair, Derek’s got every right to be. That was fucking amazing.

Stiles smiles at him then kisses him again, cupping his cheek and letting his eyes drift shut because he can. He can kiss Derek like this all slow and romantic with his eyes closed because they’re dating. Derek is his boyfriend.

If he weren’t hard from the blowjob, that would totally get him there. Wow. Who knew?

“Lie on your back for me,” Stiles whispers when he pulls back. Last time, he let Derek pick the position and things had not gone well. Stiles is prone to making mistakes, yes absolutely. However that’s just ensured that he’s well educated in the 'Fool Me Once' school of thought. Besides, watching Derek go down obediently does something to him. Shivers race down his spine which he’s going to have to take a long look at, later, when his boyfriend (holy shit they are dating) is not spread out - open-legged and still-lubed, waiting for him.

Sliding into the V of Derek’s thighs feels like a sigh. He hikes Derek’s right knee over his shoulder and fumbles on the bed for the lube. Derek’s arms are stretched up behind him, pressed against the wall making all of his muscles taut as he says, “You don’t need it.”

“Maybe I want it.”

Crinkles appear in Derek's brow, waves in his perfect forehead. “Oh."

For someone who has been fucked so much and so often there are clearly so many things Derek has never had before. Someone who wanted to take care of him in bed, for instance. Stiles plans to fix that. 

“Yeah oh. Where the hell is it?” His hand hits pay-dirt finally and he flicks open the lid one handed, his other hand holding Derek’s leg in place. The adding the lube to Derek’s hole makes for sloppy business. Stiles mumbles apologies when he hisses at the cold as it lands, thick and inelegant. Stiles drops the tube so he can rub the slick into the puckered skin, then smears the rest on his cock before pressing against Derek. He turns his head to bite Derek’s knee. It makes Derek’s eyes focus on his and flash neon blue for just a second. “Hey,” Stiles says with a grin.

“Uh, hey.” Confusion clouds Derek’s expression, wrinkling his brows. Stiles considers reaching up and smoothing them with his thumbs.

“You’re somewhere else,” Stiles says. He doesn’t have any evidence. If asked later, he couldn’t explain why he said that. There’s just something in his gut telling him that Derek is posing for him, presenting the picture he thinks Stiles wants. “Focus on me, okay? Feel me.” He drops his body so they’re pressed tight together, chest to chest, chin to chin. “Feel just me. There’s only us if we’re going to do this, you know? So feel only me.”

He watches Derek’s face, watches until muscles in his jaw loosen, his pink lips part a fraction of an inch to let a soft sigh escape.His eyes glaze over then refocus like lasers burning directly into Stiles’s retinas. “There you are,” Stiles says, grinning like an idiot. So fucking unfair, Stiles thinks, just how disarmingly beautiful Derek is like this. He slides his cock back and forth in the crack of Derek’s ass until he growls, then pushes against his hole. “Let me in.”

And then Derek just does. Like it’s nothing, like Stiles was made to be inside him. Stiles slides deep. Everything is smooth, easy, hot and slippery and all the way inside until there’s nothing between them, not even air, and Derek’s knee is pressed between Stiles’s shoulder and his own. Like this, Stiles can taste a hitch in Derek’s breath.

“You have to move,” Derek gasps, moving his hands from above his head to dig into the meat of Stiles’s ass. It hurts a little which, damn, feels really good. “Move.”

“I like it here,” Stiles retorts. He kisses Derek’s nose, his left cheekbone, his right, repeating the pattern on Derek’s heavy eyebrows, then rubs his lips over the scratchy stubble on his jaw. “I like you this close.”

“Okay. Okay fine, stay close but move. Move, Stiles, Jesus, you don’t- you don’t know what it’s like for me so you’ve got to move.”

“Tell me,” Stiles says, dragging his teeth over the stubble, following the scrape with his tongue to soothe. “What do you mean?”

“I can feel the blood moving through your veins like it's scraping over my nerves. The skin, oh my god, I can feel each cell, almost like sandpaper but not- it's not— oh, oh fuck, I can count your heart beats, okay? Everything’s all-all,” he lets out a hiccupping breath, “I don’t- Stiles it’s too-“ Derek moans and shakes his head. “God,” he sobs, eyes clenched shut. Stiles thinks he might see the glitter of unshed tears on his lashes. “Oh fucking god, it feels too- I don’t know. It’d stop if you move.”

Stiles stares, awed. He can’t imagine werewolf senses working on that acute a level but clearly, that’s happening to Derek now. Such tiny sensations were amplified so much that they overwhelmed everything else in Derek’s body. Thrusting probably would generalize the input of tactile feelings in Derek’s body. That’s scary and spectacular at once.

Sliding his left arm under Derek’s leg, he frames his face with both his hands. 

“You are the most impossibly wonderful thing ever,” he says and if Derek can feel his heartbeat, well, then he knows that Stiles means every word.

“Don’t,” Derek protests, his hands moving up to paw at Stiles’s back. His claws are out. Stiles can feel the drag of them light over his skin as Derek’s blunt fingertips dig into his skin. “Stiles.”

“You are. God, I can't believe just my body can feel so good for you. It's an actual honor.” He’s always been curious about werewolf biology and its not like Scott and Allison were up for observers in their sex lives (and no he doesn’t count when they were sharing dorm rooms because frantic under the covers giggles and moans drowned out by his iPod do not count) so just being here, buried in Derek to the hilt while he falls victim to his own body’s advanced abilities is the most erotic and enthralling experience ever. He wants to know more. His curiosity is almost as gnawing as his lust. 

Keyword being almost. He could stay here, frozen and hard forever, if it will do this to Derek. “Hey, talk to me. What’s it like? Is it like getting fucked or is it different, like one of those vibrators that are set to pulse, you know?”

“Hot,” Derek moans. “Your skin’s burning.” Not in a bad way, Stiles suspects because Derek is getting hard between them. No victory arms this time. His hands are too busy brushing back Derek’s bangs or tracing over the sharp planes of his face.

“That’s not what I asked you.” Stiles says, surprising himself.

He’s even more surprised Derek whimpers a plaintive, “Sorry. Please. Oh fuck, please, sorry.”

“Tell me what it’s like and I’ll move once.”

“Your heartbeat throbs. Throbs. It. Against me. Inside. Can feel it everywhere. It pushes and-and- fuck. Fuck, I can’t breathe. Please.”

“Okay.” Stiles grinds deeper in, twisting his hips in a circular motion rather than pulling out and thrusting back in. Derek’s clearly not expecting it. He chokes out a vaguely inhuman sound before his hands fly away from Stiles’s body, inhuman and razor sharp, digging holes in the pillowtop.

“Fuck you,” Derek gasps when he can speak again. “Bastard.”

“Next time,” Stiles promises. “You so can next time. I want you to. Your dick is too damn gorgeous not to be in me, like, ASAP.”

“Talk," Derek says, though the words come out a plea. He's never asked Stiles to talk before. It means he's getting desperate. Awesome.

“No, I'll talk later. You’re going to tell me more about what it feels like inside your ass. Can you feel how wet you are? Is the way lube is leaking out around my cock distracting you? Or do you like the mess? I think you like the mess. It’s my educated guess.”

“Nn-hm. I…It- I can feel it spreading.”

“Yeah? Spreading how?” Stiles asks. He thinks that he might come without fucking Derek at all. If things continue as they are it will end with him lying here, balls pressed tight against Derek’s ass statue still, playing twenty questions until Derek talks him off.

“Deep. After you moved. It went deeper into me.”

Screw it. Stiles wants that. He wants Derek to feel that, to feel him deeper, all the way into the back of his throat - for days, forever. He ducks his head and kisses Derek. Lazily licking along the inside of Derek’s mouth Stiles drags it out until he feels a fist in his hair. No claws, just fingernails against his scalp set him off. He only pauses long enough to murmur, “Thank you for being so good for me, Derek,” before crashing their lips together and pistoning his hips into the most rapid-fire rotation his human strength can manage.

Derek doesn’t come, not the way Stiles does. He gets hard and he thrashes and claws at the sheets and tugs Stiles’s hair and digs into his back with his heels but he doesn’t spasm or scream in completion. It all seems to be one plateau of sensation that drags on and on until Stiles is done shouting out his orgasm, twitching and sobbing out Derek’s name as he empties himself inside that gorgeous, perfect ass.

Only when Stiles comes back to himself, exhausted and full of afterglow, Derek is still jerking and gasping. He’s saying "Stiles" and "please" over and over and finally Stiles can answer.

“Derek,” he says, lifting up so that he can looking down at Derek’s dazed glowing blue eyes. “Oh my god, Derek. You are amazing. Did you know that?” He noses Derek’s scratchy cheek. “Next time you’ll fuck me. Oh my god. It’ll be freaking transcendent.

“Too much,” Derek chokes out, squeezing his eyes shut. For a second Stiles thinks he’s talking about the prospect of topping but then his eyes open and the supernatural blue glows with desperation, pleasure, and hunger so intense it almost crosses over into fear. “You have to pull out. Please. Stiles, you’re wet and hot and I can almost taste you. It’s too much.”

Now, sated and clearheaded, Stiles can think and all he can think is how beautiful Derek is. The first time he saw Derek, captured in the throes of what Stiles thought was sexual ecstasy, was nothing next to this. That Derek had been able to lie limp and silent but the man beneath him can’t be still for a second and just his breathing sounds like a scream.

Now that he's come and his brain has returned to proper working order, Stiles can hold himself up over Derek on his elbows and hold his face in the palms of his hands. “Easy, Derek, just feel it. It’s okay. It’s good right? Do you need to safeword?”

“No. No, but I can’t. Fuck, Stiles, I can’t. You have to get out of me because I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Please. Please, please, _please_. Oh god, Stiles, please. Your come’s still hot inside me and I'm- This is- I want- I-I-I can't fucking breathe, Stiles, please.”

“Derek," Stiles says, feeling like he can't breathe either. He's never been wanted like this before. Never.

“I want to taste it, not just feel it so you have to pull out. Pull out of me Stiles.” His clawed hand palms Stiles cheek so carefully. “I have to find out, have you in my mouth. Stiles, I have to.”

And okay, hard to argue with that. Stiles obliges, his soft cock slipping out easily in a mess of lube and come and Derek is on him like a starving man at a four-course meal. There’s nothing playful about this. It’s not a blow job so much as Derek consuming him, focused and methodical with Derek moaning, licking and sucking in a way that almost hurts his oversensitive cock. He'd beg Derek to stop but he makes these pleased little whimpering noises. It’s like the way Stiles come tastes, mixed with their sweat and the lube and the whole mess they've made together of Derek's ass, hits his pleasure centers as hard as a solid stroke of a tight fist over his cock. So Stiles can't find it in him to protest even when the sensation is too much. Instead, Stiles digs into Derek's shoulders and holds on until he's satisfied.

When Stiles is cleaner than he should be without a shower, Derek sags and falls with his head in Stiles’s lap. Stiles reaches down and buries his hand in Derek’s hair, earning Stiles a hum of contentment. It is, by far, the best sex Stiles has had in his life.

“Can I stay?” Stiles asks, which gets him a gentle bite on his inner thigh.

“After the shitfit you made about us being in a relationship,” Derek grouses, “you’re insane if you think you’re leaving now.” He pokes Stiles’s stomach. “You’re also buying breakfast in the morning. That’s a dating thing too. I miss the diner’s pie.”

“I’m sure the pie missed you too.” He pauses to rub his thumb over Derek’s ear.

“I missed you.”

Derek lets out a small puff of air. He scoots up so that his head is resting with his chin on Stiles’s breastbone. Stiles hears him mumble something that is barely audible in the stillness of Derek’s bedroom. Stiles can make out the whispered, “Me too,” anyway and it makes him want to squeeze Derek tight to him. Instead, he goes the less invasive route and kisses Derek’s head. Derek drapes an arm over him to pull them even tighter together.

Stiles feels like this, right here, is even better than what he’d always imagine being in love would feel like. One day, he’ll be able to say it without Derek running away.

 

~*~*~

During the year that Stiles was dating Danny back in high school, between blowjobs, handjobs, and various other jobs that ended in orgasms, Danny taught Stiles some basic hacking. Really basic. Nothing like the shit that Danny can do. Hell, Stiles knows that Danny does contracting work for the NSA and the CIA on top of whatever he does in cyber security that makes him all the fuck-you-money he has. Stiles wasn't lying, Danny is as badass as he told Derek when they first met.

Point is: skills - Stiles has some thanks to Danny. Using those skills, getting Derek's teaching schedule and office hours takes about half an hour. He already has higher clearance than most people because of his library job. Getting from there into the professor schedule excel document in the English Department server is nothing. The only delay is caused by a secrecy regarding office hours that has everything to do with the right hand not knowing what the fuck the left and nothing to do with policy. Stiles fixes that little organizational problem while he's in there because he's at work and he's bored and really, why study when he can do something else?

Turns out, Derek teaches an American Literature class with a focus on the supernatural that starts about five minutes after Stiles's criminal procedure class ends. Of course, Stiles knows the layout of the campus and the times of the buses which means that by the time he's ferried across campus to the main hall that houses English lectures, class is about ten minutes in. Add in the five minutes that Stiles takes getting completely lost in the underground tunnels of the building, and Stiles walks into Derek's classroom to find his boyfriend (which he is still not over, holy shit, Derek is his boyfriend, _his_ ) at the front of the room of thirty students, already giving a lecture.

Alright, sliding into a desk at the back of the room is absolutely stalker behavior but they hadn't gotten to enjoy a honeymoon period. They had all of yesterday to loll around in bed then Stiles had work and class and Derek had papers to grade and students to teach and- Poof! There went the shiny new relationship in-bed snuggles. Stiles was making do with eyecandy ogling and obnoxious question asking instead.

Derek is lecturing about "Call of Cthulu" of all things. He's wearing jeans and a white button-down dress shirt over a dark grey undershirt with a black sport jacket thrown over the whole thing. His hair is gelled but he's wearing his ridiculous glasses that Stiles knows he doesn't need. He tried them on when they were in bed together. They're totally cosmetic because seriously, werewolf supersight doesn't need glasses. Derek only wears them to promote the whole 'normal human' image - like Clark Kent pretending not to be Superman.

Stiles has never been attracted to him more. All that hotness on top of listening to Derek talk about how the Elder Gods are connected to Lovecraft's deep-seated racism? Yes please.

Since he is a horrible shit with no impulse control, Stiles raises his hand.

"A question?"

"Professor Hale, what do you plan on saying for yourself when Cthulu rises from his infernal slumber in R'yleh and finds out about your blaspheming?"

Derek purses his lips. Stiles grins at him from across the room. The entire room is staring at him. It's just like high school only he never wanted to fuck Finstock or Harris.

"I'm sure if or when that happens, he'll have more important things to destroy than a simple English teacher."

Stiles raises his hand again.

Derek sighs. "What?"

"Some people theorize that the Great Old Ones are real and that Lovecraft's writings were based on visions he had of them. Have you had any unusual experiences with the supernatural?"

"All experiences with the supernatural would be unusual. That's what makes it supernatural, that it’s outside the laws of the natural world. Of course I haven't."

He flashes more teeth than he needs to when he lies. Stiles wants to fuck his face so hard he wolfs out. You know, for science.

He raises his hand again.

Derek pinches the bridge of his nose. "Yes?"

"Right, so, in Lovecraft's story _The Dunwhich Horror_ , Yog-Soggoth impregnates Lavinia Wheatley, presumably with tentacles. Considering that the trope of tentacle sex pops up in everything from the Edo era painting Dream of the Fisherman's wife to that terrible _Evil Dead_ remake which tried and failed to capture the horror of the original Raimi tree-vine-rape, I'm wondering what your thoughts are, as an academic, on tentacle porn?"

Those gorgeous eyes close in frustration even as his cheeks turn pink. Students are laughing but they're trying really hard not to. Hands press over mouths and teeth dig into lips and tongues as Derek growls, "Get out of my classroom."

"That's not an answer, Professor Hale. I think everyone here wants to know. Yea or nay on tentacles when it comes to sexing. This is important stuff."

"I'm going to kill you, Stiles."

"But I need to know. How am I supposed to make important porn purchasing decisions without this input?"

The giggles from the students are barely quiet enough to be called restrained. Stiles can't stop grinning. Okay, he knows he shouldn't be doing this but he can't help it. He trolls because he cares.

"Get out or I will throw you out."

"Oh, handsy. You know how much I dig that."

"Murder. I am going to murder you."

Stiles laughs. "I can't handle that kind of sweet talk. It makes me all melty."

He points at the door. "Out. Now."

"But my education!" He sticks out his lower lip. "It's important to keep learning at every stage of life, Professor Hale."

"I'm going to give you to the count of three to go learn somewhere else before I make you sorry. One. Two. Thr-"

"I'm going, I'm going." Stiles holds up his hands and slides out of his seat. "See? This is me going." He sees Derek's mouth twitch, not his jaw but the corner of his mouth and knows that he's laughing deep down where the teacher stops and the regular werewolf begins. That little mouth quirk is why Stiles settles himself down by a water fountain between the bathrooms down hall.

He fishes out a highlighter and one of the briefs for his litigation practicum to work on while he waits. It's a two hour lecture and he's basically done with his work by the time the undergrads come pouring out. He watches them mill around the doors and rush down the halls as he climbs to his feet and waits. It doesn't take long, three minutes tops, then Derek is there, grabbing Stiles by the front of the shirt and dragging him into the bathroom.

There's a short hispanic guy who could be John Leguizamo's son standing at one of the urinals. At least he is until Derek snarls "Leave."

The guy's stream actually stops. Stiles is gagging on his snickers. "Dude, I'm taking a piss here."

That earns Leguizamo Jr. an actual growl around what Stiles thinks is the word "finish". He can't be sure. He's too busy dying of laughter and turned-on-ness as the poor guy falls over himself to get out so fast he forgets to wash his hands, which ew, unsanitary.

Once he's gone Derek reaches back, flips the lock - which is awesome because most large bathrooms like this don't even have locks - and slams Stiles into the nearest wall, which just happens to be the metal exterior of the stalls. It sends a jolt down his spine that hurts in a really good way. "I'm suddenly getting how it must've felt when Buffy and Spike brought that whole building down."

"Shut up," Derek hisses and Stiles would be worried if one of Derek's firm thighs weren't wedged between his legs, giving his aching dick something to ride even as he ground his own hips against Stiles. "What the hell was that in there, asking all those questions, in front of my class?"

"The Socratic method?"

"The Socratic- you are such an asshole," Derek breathes, shoving him against the stall again before kissing Stiles so hard and deep it feels almost like being devoured. He doesn't let go of Stiles's shirts, nothing sharp and classy like Derek, just flannel and flannel over his Threadless _Communist Party_. Instead he twists them tighter in his fists, to pull their mouths together.

When they break to breathe Stiles cards his fingers through Derek’s hair. It’s tacky with product instead of soft and easy. He tugs when he gets to the back of his scalp. “True but at least I keep things interesting.”

“Yeah. Interesting. That’s a word for it.”

“I can suck your cock and make up for it?” Stiles offers. “I’ve only been dying to since, like, our first conversation. You were all wet and naked and hard and gorgeous but you weren’t my boyfriend then.” He ducks in and bites at Derek’s neck. “You are now so there’s no reason I shouldn’t just drop down right here and blow you.”

Derek groans and lets go of his shirts, dragging his hands up over his chest to rest on his shoulders. “Stiles.”

“Is that a yes?” He scrapes his teeth along the sensitive skin beneath Derek’s jaw as he speaks. “Sounds like a yes.”

“Fucking do it already. Someone’s going to notice the door’s locked.”

“Good point,” Stiles agrees. He bites Derek’s earlobe, hard, which gets those wide strong hands pushing his shoulders down with controlled force in response. It sends his dick from granite to marble before his knees hit the surprisingly clean tile.

Making short work of the button and zipper reveals black Underarmor boxer-briefs. Yes, they are sexy but could Derek have possibly chosen a less quickie-friendly type of underwear? Jesus. It should not take so much effort to give some head.

The work is worth it when he gets them down Derek’s thighs and has that thick, beautiful cock right in front his face. The head is already exposed from the foreskin, shining and wet in the fluorescent light. Stiles licks it because he has to, okay? He’s sure there’s a city ordinance about licking precum off a cock that pretty. This is San Francisco after all.

He laps at the soft skin until Derek can’t hold back a groan which Stiles takes as a green light to take his hips in both hands and suck his dick fully into his mouth. He’s fucking committed here so he sets a slow steady rhythm of suction and exploring that he knows he can maintain for awhile. It makes Derek’s breath go shallow and he moves one hand to cup the back of Stiles’s head, touching but not holding.

“You were a freaking fantasy in there, you know that?” He breathes when Stiles lets go of his left hip, wrapping his right hand around the base of Derek’s cock to add wet strokes to the places his mouth just couldn’t reach. “You knew more than any of them. I knew, oh God, you were playing up the teacher/student thing and you- you were so, ugh, fuck, Stiles, so fucking hot.”

He knew it. Derek is such a geek. An incendiary, kinky as hell geek and it is awesome. Stiles hums in satisfaction and Derek bucks forward into his throat, making him choke. Derek gasps an apology but Stiles squeezes his hip with his left hand and doesn’t pull off.

At least not until Derek is squeezing the nape of his neck and begging, “Stiles, Stiles, stop. I want- I wanna come.”

Stiles stomps down the urge to keep going, to suck out Derek’s orgasm but he doesn’t. Derek said stop and he’s going to stop even though that’s the last thing he wants. He keeps his rhythm going with his fist but Derek bats him away, even pulls Stiles’s hands off his hips. There’s no contact between them as Derek strokes his cock with frenetic speed.

Stiles watches, so hypnotized by the motion and dazed by the abrupt disconnect he doesn’t realize what’s happening until a streak of Derek’s warm come lands across his cheek and lips. Then another and a third and a fourth that’s mostly a dribble until Derek slumps against the metal wall. His pupils are so blown as he stares down that Stiles can barely see the ring of blue-green around them. It’s filthy and hot like burning and normally the whole thing would have Stiles ready to come from that alone but Derek wouldn’t let Stiles touch him while he came. Not at all.

That puts a damper on the mood for him. Well, somewhat, because Derek reaches out and drags a thumb over the mess on Stiles’s lower lip and breathes “You are so beautiful. Fuck, look at you.” And that helps. That helps a lot. So does the way his skin tastes mixed with his come when Stiles sucks his finger into his mouth. Together with a hand shoved down his pants, that is more than enough stimuli to get Stiles off hard enough to see stars.

He lands pretty fucking hard afterward though. Derek is still grinning in afterglow when Stiles climbs to his feet and catches him by the shirt as he makes towards the sinks.

“Wait. Wait, c’mere,” he begs, looping his arm around Stiles’s neck to bring their faces together. What starts as a kiss ends up with Derek licking Stiles’s face clean with his tongue, making vaguely pleased sounds the whole time that rumble from a place in Derek that is deeper than human voices go. Stiles adds come-licking to the ever growing list of sex questions this interlude has inspired but he doesn’t pull away or protest because come-licking Derek seems to be a happy Derek and Stiles likes seeing him happy - not so much that he gives in to Derek’s protests that he not wash his face but a whole lot.

He likes the way Derek hovers behind his right shoulder too, meeting his eyes in the mirror. His eyes are hooded as he watches Stiles clean up, open and wanting in a way he would never have shown before. The combination makes it so much easier to say “We should go get pie and talk.”

“Talk?”

“Yeah. I, uh, I think we need to after that.”

Dark eyebrows form a sharp V of frustration. “You seemed to enjoy-“ He waves at the mirror. 

Stiles smiles at his reflection. “Yeah. I did.”

“So what the hell do we need to talk about?”

“Things. Stuff.”

“Wow. You are so articulate sometimes it just bowls me over.”

“Pie then talking. It’s better.”

Derek sighs and steps forward until his chest is pressed to Stiles’s back. Stiles reaches backwards for Derek’s hand, lacing their fingers together. The V loosens to a shallow U which is progress.

“I can’t say no to pie,” he huffs.

Stiles squeezes his hand tight, so tight it has to hurt. Yet when he releases, Derek squeezes back with careful precision. “I know you can’t. You’re easy,” Stiles teases when they both know he is anything but.

~*~*~

“I’ve never had boysenberry pie before,” Derek muses handing the menu back to the woman whose name-tag proclaimed her to be Sarah. Stiles had started thinking of her as “their waitress” after visit number two. She always keeps her hair covered in the required company colors using scarves instead of the store hats the younger waitstaff wear. After countless meals she still won't say where her East Indies accent is from exactly. Stiles has given up asking and now she will only let Stiles guess one island nation per visit - so far Stiles has eliminated all the places in the Beach Boys song “Kokomo,” and today checked Barbados off the list. She’s old enough to be his mother and does them the favor of pointedly ignoring their messy shenanigans and flagrant acts of homosexuality because of their tendency to tip like their immortal souls depended on it.

“It’s good, beautiful,” She says, ruffling Derek’s hair. “You’ll like it. You want me to keep them coming?”

Derek shoots her his breathtaking smile - literally, Stiles’s lungs stop working when he sees it. “Yes ma’am.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” she says to herself, turning and walking away. “I really don’t. Not normal, to eat that much pie and stay that skinny. It’s like Michael Phelps Junior or something.”

They sit in companionable silence until Abbie has dropped off their food, pie for both of them for once, although Stiles sticks to boring old apple. He pokes at the ice cream. The vanilla bean might have insulted his honor or maybe it just feels that way. That’s his best excuse for saying, “I used to get panic attacks, when I was younger.”

He doesn’t look up from the offending ice cream that is slowly melting in defeat. Derek’s gaze on him is a physical touch so he doesn’t need to. He pokes his fork at the crust this time and the ice cream slides to the right like that chunk of ice on the deck of the Titanic.

“They started when my mom got sick. She- her brain tissue just started dying off. So she just lost it little by little for a about a year, you know like a particularly angry, scary form of Alzheimer's.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah. That was about the big and the small of it. Only she didn’t linger the same way and she never fully disappeared. She just wasn’t always there and she wasn’t always 100% my mom. It was, uh,” Stiles rubs the back of his neck. Naked. That’s what he is here, 100% naked but something in him has decided that Derek is worth that exposure. “It was terrifying and it's possibly genetic.”

He doesn’t expect Derek to do anything. Squeezing his hand is definitely not on the table but that’s what he does. He doesn’t say “I understand” since like Stiles doesn’t understand most of what happened to Derek, Derek doesn’t understand this. Derek is here which makes the whole emotionally naked thing all right.

“I was eight, nine years old? So I never knew when I’d be dealing with some person with a mission I didn’t understand or talking crazy or when it’d be her, my real mom, and it messed me up. Then I was the only one in the room when she died. I couldn’t do anything to help her so I panicked, worse than ever. After she was gone, I couldn’t let go of that feeling - the panicking. So my dad put me in talk therapy with a psychologist and medical therapy with a psychiatrist and I ended up on these baby tylenol equivalents of benzos for awhile, until the anxiety stopped being so physical, you know?” He brings the fork up and scratches his lip. “I’m totally off meds now. Practice and coping mechanisms and age all pretty much made it so I can deal with what’s in my head on my own but back then I just couldn’t, even before she died, my ADHD was so bad. The anxiety was separate and I needed help, so, meds. They worked too. I managed to get down to just the ADHD ones by the time I started middle school.” He’d been so proud of it too. He still is as a matter of fact. He remembers when he passed the six month mark without an attack and his doctor took him off what he thought of as KinderXanax. His dad took him for ice cream after the appointment and neither of them said why but they’d grinned at each other a lot and talked about what Stiles was looking forward to in sixth grade. It had been a really good day. That was probably one of the first truly good days since his mom died, now that Stiles thinks about it.

“Then Scott got turned and they came back. Not at first. First we had to deal with the right-now chaos because the wolf who turned Scott,” _who I’m pretty sure was your uncle_ Stiles doesn’t say because they both know that already, “Was murdering people and trying to get Scott to murder people too. I spent weeks wolf-sitting with him in chains in the basement cell of the station. But I mean after. After it was over, after he didn’t need to be watched anymore because he had his wolfing out under control - the attacks came back for awhile. I had to get on Ativan for over a year because every time chains clinked together or a dog growled or a there was a rustle in the bushes I’d lose it.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“I wanted you to know before I got all invasive with the questions, that I’ve felt what it’s like to be really really scared. Scared for my life because I could die right now scared. When I say scared, I’m not just afraid I’ll lose it to a panic attack. I’m afraid I’ll go crazy from dementia like my mom and my dad would have to see that again and that would be worse than anything. I had to tell you that before I asked you what, exactly, your deal is. So.” He pushes the tines of the fork harder against his lower lip, feeling it make indentations. “What’s your deal?”

“My deal?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, finally looking up. “Your deal. With sex. Its okay. I don’t need you to stop or change or…anything but tell me what it is. I have to know because we started out having amazing sex then ended with me feeling kind of shitty again today and I really hated that.”

Derek is so stricken he actually sets down his fork. “You said you liked it.”

“I did. I loved blowing you. I wanted you to come in my mouth, with my mouth actually on you.” Derek bites his lips at the words but Stiles ignores it. “Instead, you didn’t let me touch you at all when you came, Derek. You actually pried my hands off of you like I wouldn’t let go if you just asked.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did but whatever. It’s fine. I really can work around whatever you need sexually so long as you’ll talk to me about it. I need to understand so if it happens again I’ll at least know why.”

Derek pokes at the crust and little pieces flake off. “And if I don’t want to talk about it?”

“We have to talk about it.”

“If I don’t want to talk about it here?”

“Then pick a place. Pick a time. You name it but you pushed me away.” He flexes his fingers in the air. “You physically pushed me away.”

Derek shudders. “It’s a thing. Like your terrible boat simile.”

“Okay. Well, extend your metaphor for me then.”

Boysenberry is apparently maroon or at least it turns Derek’s tongue that color because it’s completely dyed when it darts out to wet his lips. He drops his fork and shoves the plate away from him. “I don’t get to have it, is all.”

“The pie?”

“It.” Derek says, blushing. Jesus he is actually blushing which is insane because seriously. The guy is graphic all the time but now he’s turned into the verbal equivalent of a twelve year old trying to talk about jerking off with their dad. Stiles knows. He was there once. It was awful.

“It being…sex? You have sex all the time.”

His eyes lock on the table. His chin jerks, a subtle negative Stiles almost misses. “Okay not sex. Um, not orgasm because you totally came on my face so…” Stiles trails off and sighs. “I don’t know, Derek; is it bigger than a breadbox?”

That gets those pale eyes back on him. “What?”

“It’s the first question whenever you play Twenty Questions. I figure if you’re going to make me play we should go down the classic road.”

“I’m not. I don’t- Stiles, my family, they died because I let Kate hypnotize me with sex.” Stiles nods but says nothing. He’s afraid if he opens his mouth, even to encourage Derek, it will derail him. “So after that I decided I couldn’t ever let that happen again. Never. So I stopped letting myself. With people. I couldn’t risk it.” He clenched his fists. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Derek.”

“No, don’t. Just don’t fucking say anything, okay? It’s fine. There’s other things to. I tried having nothing but I couldn't do it and I know I should. I should have nothing. Everyone I loved but Cora is gone because of me but I’m weak. I’ve always been so goddamn weak.”

“You’re not weak.”

“I am. I’ve accepted that I can’t stop myself. I’m not strong enough to stay away or stop myself. You’ve seen me, Stiles. You know how I can get, what I am - this pathetic thing that can’t stop because the need to feel is too much.” Derek’s knuckles are white. “So I had to do something because it was too good and I couldn’t live with myself after. I fucking couldn’t.”

Stiles is suddenly sick to his stomach. He chokes back actual nausea. He doesn't know why this is worse than everything else, it shouldn’t be, but somehow it is.

“Only I couldn’t leave Cora alone,” Derek whispers. “I couldn’t make myself stop but Laura was dead so I was all she had left so I couldn’t leave her alone. So, I stopped letting myself…like it as much with other people. It got better and then I didn’t have to worry about other people at all and it was fine. I was fine. I didn’t need to worry about letting Laura down and I could do what I wanted to do and be okay.”

“So you don’t let yourself come when you’re fucking someone,” Stiles stutters because _oh god, thank you for not killing yourself over sex guilt before I got to know you_ would be bad to say now. Even if it’s true. He hates Kate Argent so much he could scream and hit things and cry. She left scars on Derek beyond the destruction of his family, she warped who he is as he sits in front of Stiles now, a crippling injustice. Stiles can’t imagine a twenty-something Derek fighting to survive the war between his natural desires and his suicidal guilt.

“No.” Derek confirms which explains so much, almost everything, from the extended hard-on their first meeting, to sending that random blow-job to Stiles, to their first time, to this evening in the bathroom.

Stiles thinks that if typical orgasms were the only price for Derek to be here, whole and open and okay enough with the situation to talk about it then that’s something he can live with. Derek seems to be living with it fine. “Never?” he asks anyway. Curiosity is getting the better of him. Also, he does have to be sure.

“No.”

“Well, that explains the softie that first time.”

Derek looks at the melted mess of his pie. “Yeah, that’s conditioning I guess. It’s kind of a relief when it happens. I can just focus on getting fucked. It’s easier and feels better. Just drift on what they do to me.”

“Which you do like, right? You don’t go get fucked like that to punish yourself too, do you?”

Derek looks up then and shakes his head, his eyes hazing over a little, his face going just a little dreamy. “Sometimes. Mostly I just… I need what it does to me."

“Okay,” he says even though the very concept reaches beyond Stiles’s experience or understanding. He cannot imagine needing something specific in sex like that, to the point where Derek clearly does, where once upon a time he was nearly destroyed. Desperation of that intensity makes the fear werewolf violence could inspire seem like nothing.

“I can’t stop. I tried.” He looks heartbroken at the very thought. “But it does things, makes things feel……I don’t know, Stiles. After the first time I did it, I couldn’t cope with not doing it again.”

“And there’s no way I can get some more specific details on the why behind that, huh?” White teeth digging into bright red lips give Stiles his answer. He sighs again but he’s okay. He has his answer on the pushing thing which is really all he needs. He finally lets himself touch Derek now, covering those tense knuckles with his fingers. “That’s fine. I don’t like the backs of my knees touched during sex so don’t ever ever do that okay?”

Derek smiles. “Okay.”

“See, you’re smiling like I’m kidding but it’s an automatic off switch plus I’ll kick you out of bed even if it’s your bed. I’m serious.” The sad fact is that he really is serious. He and Danny both found out the hard way. Stiles kneed him in the face. Jackson punched him in the solar plexus for giving his best friend a black eye. It was a mess. “So. You know. We have things.”

“We do.”

“Do you want to have things, together, in private? Back at my place?”

“Yeah. Things sound good.” Derek looks briefly yet mournfully down at the pie. “Let’s just pay and go.”

“We can get a couple slices to go?” Stiles offers. “You can eat them off me.”

Derek’s eyes flash blue and he growls. Stiles grins. He’s taking that as a yes.

~*~*~

Somewhere between work and classes and the influx of sex like he hasn't had since he was an undergrad (only more, because Derek, and also better, because, holy shit, did he mention Derek?), winter sneaks up on Stiles. Suddenly it's cold as balls with the wind cutting inland off the bay.

He feels like he blinked and when he opened his eyes, Thanksgiving was over and San Francisco was covered in decorations and lit up like a big gay Christmas tree. Stiles hates the cheer on principle because it reminds him of how miserable and terrified he is of the fact that he is going to die cold and alone when he fails his exams and is forced to drop out.

Derek laughing at him doesn't help the situation. Well, okay, it does because Derek laughing is beautiful and makes him feel better about _life in general_ but that doesn't help him learn anything. There are no flashcards involved in Derek's amusement at his deep and abiding pain.

Granted, he tests well and he writes a kick ass essay but this is law school. There are only so many As given out in each class. There is blood in the water, dark and red and raw...and, yes, he's listened to the Legally Blonde soundtrack too many times if he's thinking in song lyrics. Elle Woods inspires him and the songs are catchy but that's a whole other issue. Although sometimes he whispers "there, right, there" when Derek bends over in just his boxer-briefs.

Seriously. It's the pressure of finals. He's cracking. They should get a straight-jacket. Stiles is thinking about things he and Derek could _do_ with a straight-jacket which is, again, not conducive to learning.

Turns out he was right about professors having less to do than students during finals. Derek sits across from him at their diner with his laptop, moving answers around on his exam to circumvent cheating, grading essays and watching old episodes of The Walking Dead. He eats pecan pie and flirts with Sarah and is generally obnoxious with his air of serenity.

On his side of the booth, Stiles pounds coffee like a junkie booting black tar heroin and reads page after page of notes and briefs and textbooks until he feels like he's going blind. His side of the booth is a desolate wasteland full of sandworms, like Arakis but with no Spice. It's bleak as fuck. Although now that he's picturing it out in the blackness of space, he thinks it must be pretty, yellow and smooth in a blanket of stars and slowly spinning. It glows extra bright from the reflection of its sun in the darkness.

"Stiles?"

Stiles blinks and realizes that he'd fallen asleep, dreaming of alien worlds, right on top of his textbooks in their diner. Derek is giving him this look, all warm and soft, that reminds Stiles of his dad a little bit actually and his bones feel hot and liquid. It's an effort of will to wipe the drool off his mouth and form a coherent sentence. "What's up?"

"Not you. Come on, let's get you home. I'll get us a cab and everything."

Stiles is not expecting it when they are dropped off at his place. He laces his fingers through Derek's. Begging is still above him, barely. "I think you gave him the wrong address."

"Nope. Last stop. Come on. Get inside before you embarrass me even more, you crime against humanity."

"Crime against-? Dude." Stiles huffs, fumbling with the keys. He doesn’t bother to be too quiet. Scott can hear him anyway. "I'm a law student. I have taken international law. We studied the Hague. I know what a crime against humanity is and I am not-"

Derek kissing him cuts him off mid-word. Derek does that a lot, uses the "kissing to shut him up" trick. Stiles has caught on. If it didn't feel so damn good, he would be incensed! But it does. So, he's not annoyed, not even a little. Confused as to how he ends up shirtless and pantless in his bed, sure, but not annoyed.

“Sexy time?”

“Sleep. Stiles, you look like hell. It’s not fuckable.”

“Bite me. I’m always fuckable.”

Derek eyes glow blue in the lamplight from the table. The blue fades and his fangs appear for a brief moment before leaving Stiles with just Derek which is more than enough. He smiles as he puts his knee on the bed and reaches for the lamp.

“No.”

“To which?” Stiles asks since biting was mentioned, hey, only Alphas could turn people and Stiles was mildly masochistic so…“Both. Move over.”

“Mm.” Stiles does, and Derek climbs in after him wrapping himself around Stiles, the big spoon for once. Millions of cups of coffee and cans of Red Bull seem to flee his system in one go as his body goes utterly lax in Derek’s embrace. It’s not until they’re settled that he realizes what’s happening here. “We’re sleeping.”

“Yes, we are in your own bed.” Derek hits Stiles with one of the dozens of spare pillows to prove the point.

“Are you serious? We?”

The impact is not enough for Stiles to shake free of his shock. “But my bed is in my house. Where my roommates live too. Who you totally irrationally hate.”

“Fuck your friends,” Derek says into his mouth and okay that shouldn’t be hot and yet. Derek is always hot only Stiles’s so tired he still can’t really appreciate it. 

Stiles laughs. “I love you.”

“What? I can deal with your mutt and Tauriel.”

“Calling her that is a compliment, you know. She kicked ass. So did Arwen.”

Derek tugs Stiles’s head down. “Not having a Tolkien fight about a character who wasn’t even in the fucking book. Sleep."

Stiles laughs, twisting in Derek’s arms to nuzzle the soft beard under his jaw. Huge hands smooth up and down his back. Fuck singlehood, coupledom rocks him like a hurricane. Stiles loves it. “You smell like a warm puppy.” He mumbles into warm skin and dark hair so Derek can get it too.

"Mhm." 

 

Stiles gives Derek's chin another sloppy kiss then drifts off, back into the darkness of Frank Herbert-y space, now featuring Middle Earth folk. He does sleep. He doesn’t realize what he's said for a good eleven hours of it. It's a record amount of time between saying something stupid and realizing it was stupid. 

 

He deserves a medal or maybe a swift sledgehammer blow to the fucking face because oh my God. Oh my god. Oh! My! GOD!

He takes the stairs down to the common rooms two at a time in nothing but his boxers. Horror thankfully overcomes his morning wood and he finds Derek and Allison looking at each other over coffee. Silent and wary but just looking. God bless coffee. “Oh, uh, hi, um, guys. Whaaaat’s up?”

“Derek and I were just talking,” Allison says, giving him a warm smile. Yeah, because that looked super chatty to him. Fuck number two. “His dad and mine were on the basketball team together, friends.”

“Oh. Huh. Neato. Derek. Can I steal you? Like right this fucking second?”

“I thought you wanted me to make nice with her, Stiles."

"I do. I really do. Great job you too, can we first, uh, sidebar?"

"Your lawyer talk is only sexy when you don't look like you swallowed a Japanese fighting fish alive."

"He has a point there," Allison agrees and doesn’t it figure that on this she would align with Derek of all things. "You look like you have been eating gross things with Scott again."

“Peanut-butter, jelly and Ruffles sandwiches aren’t gross. They’re a delicacy, okay, and I do not look like anything except awesome. I look awesome always, all the time. Just, Derek, please, over here, for like a second.”

Derek pushes back from the table and ambles over, every move a picture of perfect lupine grace. He’s not wearing anything under the terribly touristy black, triple XL, Paris hoodie Stiles bought when they studied abroad. It is huge and snuggly on Stiles but on Derek’s broad shoulders it just sort of hangs like an open door invitation. Step right in for abs of steel and sublimely well-waxed pecs. 

He’s torn between tugging the zipper down and licking a path between his six-pack muscles down to the top of his flannel pants and freaking right the fuck out. Freaking out is winning because Allison and Derek. Hunter and hunted. In his _kitchen_. 

“I thought we had a problem here,” he stage-whispers, hands flapping with all the emphasis his voice can’t supply at the moment. “You can’t, like, eat her up bones and all, Derek. This is not the grandmother in Little Red Riding hood okay, this is my sister.”

“The only person I do any eating of is you,” Derek replies. He is definitely smirking. Yep. That’s a smirk and he totally licks his lips. “And that’s more eating out than eating up and you know it.”

He says Derek’s name plaintively. Talking about rimming in polite company is cheating. His whole body clenches at the very mention and he goes from zero to rock hard in .035 seconds. Derek’s got those gorgeous limbs and his tongue is just- no. No, he is not going to be pulled off topic and the topic is not mind-blowing oral, much as he’d like it to be.

It’s Derek and Allison in the same place at the same time with everything that lies between his family here. That scares the shit out of him, it really does. Stiles isn’t going to beg, wouldn’t know what to beg for except that it’s Allison okay? Allison who bakes his dad gluten free cake on his birthday and then drives Stiles to Beacon Hills every year so he can hold it and make sure it looks perfect when they arrive. 

“Stiles. I’m trying here.”

“Trying?”

“For you.”

Stiles opens his mouth then shuts it and reaches out to fiddle with the zipper. He doesn’t know if Derek would take a hug. He doesn’t always. This says _want_ though, in a quiet unspoken language he knows Derek understands when Stiles is pulled into Derek’s chest which, God, smells really good.

“I want the people who love me to be happy,” Derek whispers into his ear. He is so quiet Stiles can hardly hear him. The words are meant just for Stiles and say that Derek heard him last night. He heard Stiles’s confession and he’s not running away. He doesn’t even need Derek to say it back, he really doesn’t. He just needs this, for him to stay.

“Thank god,” Stiles breathes before kissing the crap out of him in the kitchen, bullying him backwards into the fridge with his body. He wraps his arms around Derek’s neck and lifts himself by them never doubting that Derek will catch him under the thighs, or ass in this case, and pull him close for his legs to wrap around that narrow waist tightly.

“I’m going to finish this cereal upstairs,” Allison says to them but neither respond. She picks up her bowl and spoon and slides past them without Derek or Stiles so much as blinking at her.

Stiles isn’t going to let Derek stop kissing him. He may get himself fucked on the kitchen table if he can swing it, vengeance for the countless times he came home to the living room a disaster and Scott and Allison red-mouthed and disheveled. Mostly though, he’s good to hang on and let Derek do the wolf-strength thing and move him around. 

“Grab the top of the fridge,” Derek says directly into his mouth and oh god yes. There are packets of lube in the pockets of that hoodie. Derek holds him up one armed around the waist as he pulls both their pajama bottoms down just enough. Stiles has never been more grateful for werewolf strength and speed than when Derek preps his cock and pushes inside Stiles in the space between heartbeats. 

Humming pleasure pulls through Stiles’s whole body as Derek fucks up into him. The angle hits the sweet spot every fucking time and Stiles is talking. He’s babbling about Derek’s gorgeous cock and his stupid face and how he feels so full, so much, and “Fuck, fuck me harder Derek goddamnit that’s perfect.”

Derek mostly grunts and breathes in the smell at the underside of his jaw, biting and sucking. Derek’s been leaving and renewing the hickies there since they started this and oh, god, he loves it. It’s things Derek can’t say on his skin and he doesn’t even care that his boss and professors give him the side eye.

His orgasm hits him like a sucker punch and he scrabbles at Derek’s shoulders, gasping and, coming, coming, “Oh fuck Derek, I’m coming, fuck.” 

“On me. Come on me Stiles. I want you to,” Derek growls, reaching between them to direct Stiles’s cock onto the smoothness of his stomach. Stiles’s eyes are slammed shut so he misses the sight of white splattering Derek’s skin. He gets to see it when Derek carefully pulls out and lets him down. It drips down the divots of muscle towards the dark thatch of hair above his cock. Stiles wants to lick it up.

Before he can, Derek catches him by the scruff of the neck and pulls him back. “Don’t. I want to smell like you,” he confesses, almost gentle and scared and Stiles fucking whimpers. Yes, okay? Yes.

“Okay. Can I-?” He holds out a hand and touches the dripping streaks and rubs it in, just a little “Until you get off?” Derek moans and his head falls forward onto Stiles shoulder, moving to nod against his shirt. It’s a resounding yes and Stiles massages his semen into that beautiful body as Derek strokes himself. It’s such huge progress, being able to lay hands on him at all when he’s close, when he’s coming that when Derek comes with his blunt human teeth digging into Stiles so hard, it leaves divots in the skin. 

“I love you,” Stiles says, like punctation more than anything. Derek grunts into his shirt and holds him tighter around the same time that Scott walks into the kitchen and screams, high pitched and long, like a little girl in a horror movie. Derek laughs, into his collarbone now, the sound following a scrambling Scott upstairs and away.

~*~*~

Cora Hale looks so much like her brother that when she buzzes him into the building and he finds her on his living room couch, thumbing through a copy of Frankenstein, Stiles thinks for a second that Derek has been transformed into a girl. What? It could happen. They are werewolves. He almost got turned into a newt once. Anything is possible in Stiles’s crazy mixed up world. 

Plus, they could have a lot of fun with Derek plus girl parts before they got him back. Stiles has only been with one girl but he had a lot of fun with her. Then the woman on the couch lifts her head from the book and glares at him. 

It is a Hale glare, definitely. It just wasn't _his_ Hale’s glare. The way her lips purse and the lines between her eyebrows aren’t Derek’s either and she scans him up and down in a way that isn’t the least bit sexual or affectionate. “So you’re the boyfriend.”

“Did Derek actually use that word? Boyfriend?”

She makes a rude noise with flapping lips, her glare not breaking. “Please.” 

“Yeah. Um, hi then. Are you…”

“Cora.”

“Right. Cora. You’re Derek’s little sister. He’s told me a lot about you. You’re in med school right?”

“Something like that.”

“And so easy to talk to.”

“It runs in the family,” She agrees. “Do you know when Derek will be back?”

Stiles shakes his head. 

Normally he’d say the end off office hours but they have another week before school starts back. Normally Stiles could predict his movements. Normally doesn’t come into play lately what with Derek looking raw all break. There’s no other word for it. His eyes are bloodshot and he can’t stop twitching. Even his skin somehow looks like it's pulled too tightly over his bones. Stiles didn’t know a werewolf could look that bad. 

When they’re in bed together, Stiles fingernails dig deep as if that will hold them together. He wakes from sleep to find he's clinging, as if his unconscious is afraid that if he lets go, a tide of air and weakness will sweep Derek away.

"Sorry."

"So you're useless then."

"Wow. I can just imagine your bedside manner."

"No," she murmurs, "You really can't."

Stiles has nothing to say to that so he kicks off his shoes in her direction, okay, at her. He wants it to hit her because she's being an asshole. He can admit that. 

She grins at him all teeth, and meets his eyes with a hint of Alpha power yet no glow in her eyes. Stiles breaks the gaze first because he watches Animal Planet. He knows who the apex predator in the room is. He gets himself out of the living room and into the bedroom as fast as possible and crawls into Derek's bed with all his clothes but his jeans on. Wrapped up in Derek's smell against the cold outside and the wolf outside the door, he wills himself to sleep.

He wakes up to that unnerving feeling of being watched. Derek is sitting in the lotus position at the foot of the bed, staring at him. The corners of his lips are pulled down in a frown, tugging his bushy eyebrows together. Stiles can't help but think he looks more melancholy than angry but then, he's always seen more sadness than fury in Derek.

"You're too far away," Stiles yawns, still drousing. "'S warmer in here."

"I'm okay. Stiles, I need you to wake up."

"Ngh." He pulls the covers and duvet over his head. "No."

"Stiles." A hand lands on his ankle and squeezes. "Stiles, I want to talk."

Few things scare Stiles more than Derek actually wanting to talk because good things are rarely said. Someone could've set off an EMP in the school mainframe and all the grades of all students could be gone and Stiles could have to start law school over again. It could be something horrible has happened with his family and that's why Cora is here. He could want to break up. Bottom line, nothing good ever comes out of his mouth after those words. 

He sits up, scrubs a hand through his hair and puts his game face on. "Okay. What’s up?"

"Victoria Argent's called off her annual terrorizing of Cora. Allison talked her into it."

"That's great!"

"So, her grandfather launched a full scale attack assuming that Victoria had given up on her humanity. She barely got out of New York alive." Derek doesn’t look sad now. He looks haunted. "He's threatening to reach out to other hunter families if she goes back to the east coast."

Stiles stares and blinks and blinks again. "What? How can that even happen? She's in school. They can't just force her to leave."

"Yes," Derek says on a broken laugh,"They can. There are more of them than there are of us. Strength in numbers is law." He closes his eyes in a slow motion flinch. "She submitted family emergency withdrawal paperwork on the drive out here." Stiles watches Derek open his eyes to look up at the ceiling, a trick every kid learns in elementary school for trying not to cry. "They accepted. She's going to try and transfer somewhere west of the Rockies. That was the deal."

"Jesus."

"So she's moving in with me until, I don't know, we figure things out."

"Yeah. Of course." He holds out his arms. "C'mere."

Derek's eyes dart around the room. When he's sure, of what Stiles isn't sure, that he isn't being watched maybe, he crawls up the bed and into Stiles's embrace. He buries his face in Stiles's neck and inhales deeply. "This was supposed to be over," he exhales.

"I know but at least she's safe and hey, you get a chance to spend time with her."

"If I hadn't-"

"Don't."

"Yes. Stiles it is. I did." He tips his chin back and up. "I want to go back."

At first, Stiles thinks he means to New York but then it hits him like a crosstown bus. No, he means to Hard Rick’s. That’s the real “talk” in here because Derek knows that Stiles wouldn’t be upset by Cora being here, by what the Argents are doing here. He has to know that after everything. It’s the dark needs Derek thinks he has to be ashamed of that would constitute an official conversation. 

And okay, yes, Stiles doesn’t love the idea. However, they did talk about this when they first got together. He’d said he was alright with it and he meant that. He doesn’t get the whole thing beyond the intellectual but hey, different strokes. He’s fine with a lack of physical monogamy as long as he has Derek’s heart and he does. He so, so does. 

“Okay.”

“I need to feel.”

“Okay.”

“Stiles I don’t want to feel empty like this any-“

“Dude, I said okay. Stop. Please. I’m cool with it but I don’t need the Dear Penthouse version.”

“No.” He squeezes Stiles a little tighter. “I mean, I, Stiles, I want you with me. Like before. It was better with you there.”

Oh. 

Oh.

Well fuck.

"Not now, though, right?” 

“No,” Derek drawls, his tone having made a clear shift from desperate to well and truly annoyed. He slides against Stiles side shedding clothes as he goes. "Now I just I need to feel your heartbeat."

Lifting Derek's big hand, Stiles places it on his chest. "Right there. Skipped a few maybe but otherwise it's beating just fine."

"Need to feel it beating inside me." The _you idiot_ goes on unspoken. Stiles doesn't see the need to argue with that. Especially not with the way Derek gently manhandles him onto his back, uses that unnatural speed to slick them up, and sinks down. Watching the tension drain out of Derek from the sensation of being filled by him, Stiles Stilinski, is awe inspiring every time. That overwhelming feeling hits Stiles even harder this time, knowing how heavy a weight is weighing on Derek because of Cora. He feels powerful and beneficent, too big for his body, knowing this truth, that he can help make shouldering these burdens easier for Derek. 

If the club can help the same way, then of course he should go and Stiles will go. Not now though. Now he digs his hands into the solid meat of Derek’s ass and guides him as he fucks himself on Stiles’s cock. He exerts the quiet dominance that Derek seems to crave until his lover is sobbing with pleasure on top of him, rocking his hips back and forth so hard the whole bed shakes. His body is rippling, fur to skin and back again, and the noises he’s making are more animal than human and loud.

“Shhh,” Stiles half moans-half laughs. He can’t help it. Seeing Derek like this is so beautiful it just makes his heart ache with joy. Besides, that some of their best ever sex should take place with Derek’s baby sister in the other room is too funny. “She’ll- oh my god, she’ll hear us.”

“Stiles. Werewolves.” Derek replies. Each syllable is panted out like its own word. 

Yes. Right. Super-hearing. Excellent then. So Stiles decides not to stop himself from screaming the apartment down as he comes. 

He isn't expecting it when Derek bites him. Maybe he should be, he's in love with a werewolf after all. Only fucking a vampire could make the bite more expected. Yet when Derek bends down, rolling through Stiles's orgasm and his fangs break the skin, Stiles is caught off guard anyway. No, that's not right. He's flat out shocked because it hurts like hell. Then Derek comes, actually comes, with Stiles still inside him and pressed against him. It's cataclysmic, is what it is, earth-shattering and cosmos-rearranging. 

“Derek,” Stiles murmurs. “Oh Derek babe.” His fingers itch to run through Derek’s hair or to stroke up and down his back. He will do anything to ease the shaking. He wants to thread himself into Derek and tell him crazy things. “That hurt,” is what comes out.

“Sorry,” Derek whispers, mouth slipping against his skin in the blood of his neck. “You won’t turn. I’m a beta.”

“I know.” Scott bit him once during a blood moon when they were in high school. Now doesn’t seem like the time to mention that fact. Stiles taps two fingers against his neck and asks, “Derek, hey, can I-“

“Yeah. Yes.”

Stiles doesn’t hesitate to thread his fingers through Derek’s thick, dark hair. He combs his nails against the scalp as Derek shudders and shudders and _shudders_ and licks Stiles’s blood off his lips. 

“Thank you.”

“Derek.”

“Just shut up,” Derek snaps, “and say you’re welcome.”

Stiles smiles at the ceiling. “You’re welcome. Shower?”

“No.” Derek’s fingers dig into his hips so hard it actually hurts a little. “We should stay here.”

“You like the mess.”

“And Cora is between us and the bathroom with a tub.”

“Okay point but don’t lie. You love the smell and the stickiness and all the icky sex things.”

That earns him a growl, low and soft, and a gentle tongue on his new wound. Yeah. He knows Derek too well for him to get away with that but this- This was big. 

Today, Derek told Stiles what was wrong without being needled. He asked for what he needed. Hell, even without all that, the fact that Derek somehow managed to come during sex despite all his baggage would make today red banner. 

Stiles is seriously considering getting pie delivered. As bad as it started, it’s turning into that kind of day. He wonders idly as he sinks into the bed beneath two-hundred pounds of muscled werewolf what Derek thinks about peaches. 

When they get up, he’ll check the freezer for vanilla ice cream and call Scott. He owes Stiles more than one and delivery boy is an easy payback. He just will have to keep both Hales away from from his lone wolf friend until he has the pie secure. 

Yeah, Stiles decides as he fades into a post-sex cat nap. It’s a good plan for a good day. 

Actually, turns out that nope, it’s a terrible plan. The pie was a good idea but everything else was just…bad. Not good. Pick a synonym, any synonym. 

Scott sees or smells or, shit, hears the bite when Stiles opens the door. Suddenly Stiles’s got three fully wolfed out monsters surrounding him, shouting at each other, one of them with glowing red eyes. She doesn’t even need her teeth and claws to make her truly terrifying with those eyes although Scott looks so angry he’s starting to spook Stiles. 

“He bit you?” Scott snarls. His fangs have dropped and flash with each word. “You bit him. You’re lucky you can’t turn him or I would kill you. Jesus, who the fuck do you think you are?”

“You’re overreacting, McCall.”

“Did you tell him or did you just-“

Stiles is ready to punch them both in their condescending faces. “He’s right here, assholes.”

“You’re not in this relationship, so how about you fuck off.”

“Derek.” Stiles can feel a tension headache building behind the bridge of his nose. “You’re making it worse.”

“He can’t make it worse, Stiles. It is worse.”

“Do you even have a reason why? Because so far there’s just a lot of yelling.”

“Because I bit Allison like that, Stiles! In France. Her parents don’t even know and yours is right where everyone can see. Do you know what that’s going to do?”

Stiles knees go liquid. France was their honeymoon. “You got married right before France.”

Scott folds his arms over his chest. He doesn’t look smug exactly, but there is a degree of righteousness to his expression. “Yeah. We did.”

“Oh please,” Cora groans. She drags a hand through her long hair and fixes a glare at Scott. “You have no actual idea what you’re talking about. It’s not like they got werewolf married or anything. It’s just a love bite. God, you fucking drama queens. All of you. You’re lucky I’m here. You need someone to give you asshats a reality check.”

Stiles feels breathless. “Love bite?” He’s always known Derek doesn’t do words. It would make sense that this is just another way he’s not doing words. Stiles touches the scab with his fingers and looks at Derek. His expression is closed off but there are other people here and when he looks at Stiles’s fingers on the bite, his pupils dilate. The “Oh,” that escapes him doesn’t feel breathless, it is breathless. 

Possibly he’s more than a little nuts. Probably that is what makes him match up with a basketcase like Derek as well as he does. They are all staring at him, 3 pairs of eyes all glowing different shades and he nods.

“Oh my god. Morons,” Cora mutters. She gives Scott an appraising once over like he’s a cheap cuckoo clock on Antique Roadshow. “You don’t even have a pack, do you?”

All the muscles in Scott’s shoulders tighten. “I’ve gotten along fine for the last six years without one.”

“If you’re biting your human wife until she scars because you think it’s a mating bond, you’re doing something wrong,” Derek points out. “Stands to reason you’re doing other things wrong too. Don’t you want to know who you are before you guys have kids? Allison told me you guys were thinking about it.”

Scott’s slightly uneven jaw drops. “You talked to Allison? About our future children?”

“Oh yeah, they're bros now.” Stiles says. “Did you not know that?.”

“It’s all one big happy goddamn family,” Cora snarls. “See how happy we are? So happy. I'm just thrilled I decided to move out to California.”

Scott blinks at her with the puppy dog eyes. “You are?“

Stiles drags his hand down his face. He finds himself actually afraid for Scott’s life. Cora may literally gut him. She probably wouldn't even feel bad afterwards. “Sarcasm, Scott. That was sarcasm.”

“Well I don’t know her! She could’ve been serious. Everything she says sounds angry.”

“That would be because I’m angry,” Cora interjects. “I've got a lot of justifiable issues that are absolutely none of your business if you're not part of my pack. We're not having share and care time if you're not all in. Decide if you are or not but this idiocy circle jerk is getting boring and I’m losing patience with you.”

Scott blinks. “What? I say yes and you accept me then I'm pack. Just like that?”

Cora nods. “Just like that.” She smiles and its all teeth and red eyes. “I’m the Alpha.”

“Um,” he casts a glance at Stiles who nods. 

Stiles wants this to work. Derek isn’t going anywhere and neither is Scott and if they’re pack, they’re basically family. Stiles wants that. He doesn’t know how that choice would end if he had to pick between his lover and the man who is his brother in all but blood. If they’re connected, he won’t ever have to. It’s totally selfish and he gives zero fucks. Scott needs a pack anyway. He refuses to feel guilty for wanting a win-win scenario.

“I don’t have to live with you or anything, do I?”

“Holy shit, no.”

“Okay, yeah. Sure.”

“Okay then. Welcome to the Hale pack.”

Something must happen because all the wolves in the room inhale and then relax on a long sigh as one. Scott sways on his feet, grinning sloppily like he used to when he could get drunk. He looks from Cora to Derek then back. “Oh wow.”

“See?” Derek gloats, although he looks better too. The bags under his eyes are smaller all of a sudden. “I told you you were doing it wrong.”

Stiles laughs so hard he falls over and hits his head on the coffee table. It’s okay though. He doesn’t hit it too hard. It’ll just be a bruise.

~*~*~

Stiles thinks ahead and brings flip-flops with him to Hard Rick’s. Also, and this is some Don’t Panic shit right here, he remembers his own towel - an extra large one so he doesn’t have to worry about it slipping out from underneath him. Those two things plus walking in with his fingers laced with Derek’s make the bathhouse look completely different than any other time he’s been.

He squeezes Derek's hand and watches that ass move across the room. It's going to get turned out like a truckstop whore in a less than an hour and he's not as jealous as he thought he would be. It's his hand Derek's clinging to, him that his boyfriend keeps glancing over his shoulder to smile at. He's the one who will get to watch Derek pull out his towel and that ridiculous tub of Boy Butter and hold it in his hand and fold himself over the bench like that very first time.

"Can you get your whole fist inside me this time?" Derek asks. His words are muffled from the way he's got his head in the locker but Stiles can hear them plenty well enough for his heart to nearly quit on him. 

He opens his mouth a couple times to try and speak and when it doesn't work he forces a cough. That loosens his larynx and he says "Yeah. Yeah we can do that, beautiful. We can do anything you want. "

Derek lifts his head at that. "We can?"

"Yeah of course."

"Then, uh, remember how last time I told you not to Dom me?"

Stiles nods. Derek has a submissive streak a mile wide and exploring it in bed's been almost enough to make up for the whole no orgasms thing in his silly, Westernized, expectation-having heart of hearts. "Yeah. I shouldn't have done that. We didn't discuss it and neither of us had a safeword or-"

"We both have safewords now, Stiles."

God, did it get suddenly hot in the locker room? It was. It was hot in here. "We do."

"So you can. If you want. You know you have my word." He pressed himself along Stiles’s body and nipped his earlobe. "Incunabula and pineapple. Right?"

"That should not be sexy. It's fruit and textbooks," Stiles whispers back as men filter in and out past them. He had wished that Derek would let him run this, but he hadn't actually hoped. Now that he's being handed Derek's submission, he could giggle with excitement. 

"You know it’s not a textbook." Derek says as he peels off his clothes. God, even his ridiculous sweater vests are sexy. Stiles is so goddamn in love with this man. "I want your hand in me now. Can you do that or not?"

"Shit. Lie the fuck down," he growls and Derek just goes. He melts onto the bench the way his hole softens and opens for Stiles's cock when they fuck - like this is the true nature of Derek and everything else is the illusion. 

"Yes," Derek hisses, shifting so he straddles the bench instead, his ass open and exposed for Stiles and for a new man who's just walked into the room. He stops at Stiles's shoulder and watches as he scoops up three thick fingerfuls of lube and rubs them into Derek's hole.

"He's amazing, isn't he?" Stiles asks the spectator as his fingers sink in all at once, god bless that Werewolf healing factor. "So open. He's like a fucking furnace inside." He kisses what would be a bruise on anyone else's skin but leave nothing on Derek. "So gorgeous."

"Yeah," the spectator, early fifties, white, effeminate and fit, gets out in a voice that sounds strangled. "Your boyfriend is a wet dream."

"He is," Stiles agrees with a hum, pulling out his hand to push back in with his pinky. 

Derek's body swallows him and he is stunningly hard. Stiles massages the rim with his thumb and hears two different breaths catch. The man beside him forgets to take in air at the sight. Derek moans out twice without a single inhalation at the sensation. That's the sound he cares about though, that plus the full body shiver that follows tells him it’s time. He smooths around his hand with the butter then kisses the base of Derek's spine and whispers, "Perfect. Open for me." It's so quiet that only Derek could possibly hear him. 

Hear him and obey he does and Stiles's hand disappears inside. What is gravity? What is standing? He sinks down to sit beside Derek so he can run his hand through his thick black hair and repeat over and over how hot and tight and wonderful he is inside and Jesus so good, such a good boy for him, and Stiles realizes he might be crying like a bitch but wow does he not care. This is where it started, right here in this room and in this room he feels closer than ever to Derek. 

"Fuck me," Derek sobs. "I need them to fuck me. Stiles please, please, god, Stiles, please."

Stiles twists his wrist, just to wring a cry out of Derek when his thumb scrapes his prostate and shushes him. "They will. You'll be a gorgeous mess. My mess."

"Yes," Derek chokes out. He sounds relieved. Stiles heart aches for him, for the damage Kate left behind that he needs this and with love that he can give him what he needs at all, that Derek's opened up enough to let him. The guy he first met in these rooms would never have done that. He feels stupidly proud to be the guy to have helped that to happen even though he knows it was all Derek in reality - his choices, his bravery.

He slides his fist out, rolling his knuckles as he pulls to make Derek writhe. When his hand is free, he helps Derek up, grabs their towels and walks them to the back rooms. 

Stiles remembers the exact set of foam pads that were supposed to be couches where he first met Derek and drifts there without thought. He feels powerful, spreading out first the blankets, then Derek. People here know him, know what Derek sprawled and naked means and in a few minutes there's a small crowd. This time though, Stiles is in charge and when a tall man with huge hands and a hard cock lifts Derek's hips, Stiles says, "Wait," and throws a condom at him.

The guy blinks at him like Stiles just spoke in the clicking dialect of Xhosa. His shock lasts all of five seconds before he rips open the packet and covers himself in latex. He thrusts in and Derek's whole body bows and he shouts, the sound torn from his chest. His hand gropes upwards until it finds Stiles's skin. Stiles laces their fingers together and Derek's body goes lax, letting the man fuck him like the empty doll he isn't. Stiles can feel his presence in his death grip on his hand. He hasn't left. It's beautiful, just like it was that first time only now there's life where there was nothing. 

Stiles doesn't pay much attention to the men who fuck Derek. He makes sure they use a condom and keep their hands off Derek's rock hard cock so that Derek can enjoy this. Derek is alight, lost in his own body and pleasure, eyes open but locked on Stiles instead of screwed shut like they always were before. The difference is so dramatic that Stiles wants to cry a little. He helped do this. He helped bring Derek here. 

"You're doing so good," he murmurs, bending himself in half so he can whisper straight into Derek's ear. It makes Derek keen like a puppy, the most wolf he can let out here in public. Stiles pets his hair in response. "I'm so proud of you, Derek, God."

Derek gasps out something that sounds like a 'please' but he doesn't specify what. Please fuck me? Please blow me? Please touch me? Please make them stop? Please give me more? The number of things he could be asking for seem infinite. 

Still, simplicity seems the best way to go so Stiles decides the please means kiss me and bends in half to press his lips to Derek's. It seems to be the right thing to do because the hand not clutching his comes up to fist in the back of hair and pull him closer. He licks into Stiles's mouth in time to the thrusts of the stranger fucking him, moaning with each in stroke.

Stiles pulls back and asks, "Can you come?" 

"If they stop."

"Do you want to?"

"No. Just want to feel this, you, it's-Stiles. Oh god. Kiss me again? Please? Please kiss me again. Fuck."

Stiles smiles as he tastes his boyfriend's pleasure. Derek melts for him, pliant and stunning and actually happy, not pained or forced or desperate just pure enjoyment.

Gangbangs aren't really his kink but Derek is a wild thing who has chosen to be his out in the world and here in a sea of other people with their hands on his body. God, that's so much better than anything he's ever imagined. So, if he's honest, gangbangs, they're growing on him.


End file.
